Jean-Jacques Rossouw is a Cape Town-based art director as well as an interactive experience, multi-media and game designer. For the past 10 years, his focus has been on exploring liminal spaces between the physical and digital, particularly through interactions that aid communication across different cultures, historical backgrounds and personal boundaries. His training in dance and theatre intersects with a background in UX, animation, motion graphics and digital design to give him a physically grounded understanding of the digital possibility. This has shaped the way he looks at space and narrative as an emotive and choreographed performance. His work includes projects for the “Wonderdal Edutainment Centre”, “Old Fort Museum”, “Shark Sense Virtual Reality Exhibit”, “River of Grass Interactive experience for Patricia and Philip Frost Museum of Science” and “Swazi Yolo HIV Education Game” to name a few.
Outside of projects such as these, he is also the co-founder of Exhibit.gif. This digital art collective and exhibition concept celebrates animated gif’s, and the artists who create them, by situating the works in physical gallery spaces. This rightly elevates them from pieces of digital ephemera to artforms in their own right, questions the digital/physical dichotomy and, importantly, provides a space to advance the recognition of art created in new media.