Desperate Agnosticism is an exploration of my religious views. I am an Agnostic up until the point I am in a desperate situation, then my desperation constitutes as proof God, but considering that my desperation is not enough to prove God’s existence I am therefore left to desperately hang on to my Agnosticism.
That sense of holding onto faith in a breaking system mirrors how I see South Africa today. At its core, the country struggles to reliably provide the basic foundation of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, like stable electricity, running water, and dependable rail networks. This leads to an exacerbated economic divide in South Africa as an insulated tier of large corporations, banks, and tech firms can navigates this collapse by buying their own solar microgrids, private logistics, and automated systems to compete globally in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, an exposed tier such as mining, manufacturing, and small-to-medium businesses bears the full weight of crumbling municipal infrastructure. Relying purely on digital or financial sectors while our productive industrial base erodes leaves millions of unemployed citizens structurally excluded from economic life, keeping trend GDP growth stuck below 1%. Chasing the high-tech promise of 4IR while the lights will not stay on is our own desperate act of faith.
To explore this divide, I turned to CycleGAN, an AI model that translates one visual dataset into another. I trained the model on two collections of images: clouds in the sky, and the Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) growing along the M1 highway. The highway serves as a physical network, much like digital bandwidth or supply corridors.
The chosen stretch sits between the Jan Smuts and Woodmead off-ramps. Smuts was ousted after misreading the moment, fixated on global diplomacy while ignoring the domestic anxieties of a white electorate. At the other end, the Woodmead off-ramp, located next to the Huawei Office Park, marks our modern embrace of China. Yet the current state risks its own fatal blind spot by chasing 4IR buzzwords while failing the country on basic infrastructure.
By turning this fast-growing Chinese tree into clouds, the work highlights a simple reality: you can promise the future in the digital sky, but the moment the highway stalls, the weight of the traffic becomes ever present.
