We recently connected with Izak Potgieter and have shared our conversation below.

Izak, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

I have been working making virtual reality representations of historic places in South Africa that were demolished under apartheid, the political system in the country that harshly segregated people of different races. multicultural hotspots such as Sophiatown in Johannesburg went against its ideology, these places were demolished and its people forcibly removed to areas far away from city centres and hubs of opportunity. I have been working with the Trevor Huddleston Centre, a museum in the neighbourhood where the old Sophiatown stood. Currently they take you on tours of the neighbourhood telling you what used to be there. We saw an opportunity, through VR, to actually show people what this lively and complicated place, known as the Chicago of South Africa, among many other names, actually looked like.

There was, however, a problem. The place was not documented very well. How then can we recreate it? Through interviews with former residents we were able to not only capture details of this place and fill in a lot of the blanks, but we were able to see it through their eyes, their memories paint a intimate picture of what Sophiatown was and what it meant through many different voices. Not only is this a new way of learning about historic place. it is also a way of accessing history directly from the people who lived it,, unfiltered by ideology or external ideas. The memories of the former residents are the history. VR allows us to engagement with that directly. Sophiatown is gone, as one of its famous residents, Miriam Makeba, sang. Bringing it back in VR is a fallacy, it’s gone. All we can do is present memories of it to people. To me that is a very powerful thing, we aren’t trying to ‘fix’ a historic injustice, al we can do is try and create a platform to engage with it and talk about it.

South Africa has an unimaginably complex history and as a nation we are very much still working through it. Many of these stories were recorded for the first time and would soon have been lost forever, to me that has been the greatest contribution I could make and has been very special to me. To be able to save these stories and to combine them with visual 3D models of what they are talking about. It’s all about these stories we need to grapple with as South Africans.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My road into VR and history has been…accidental and filled with leaps of faith. I trained as an architect, and started working in a firm, it was not quite what I expected to say the least. I had a studiomaster in university who always said. “Architecture is a wonderful thing to study if you want to do anything else.” That stuck with me. So I ended up trying out all kinds of things based on my interests. 3D printing services, video game design, 3D modelling, architectural rendering you name it. I made some video games that someone caught on to and I was invited to do a talk at an event called ‘Digital Utopias’ on the video games I had made. This was a turning point for me.

I was second to last on the agenda and as these things go, we were way behind schedule. The coordinator of the conference came to me towards the end of the day and asked me if they can cut me out of the program to end the day on time, promising to invite me back next year. Look I have been nervous about giving this talk all day, I was terrified of talking in front of a crowd like that. On top of that I am a pretty go with the flow person. In spite of this and I don’t know what got into me but, without thinking I simply said no. I said I will give this talk today, and I will stay within my timeframe. This was 2019, so without any of us knowing, Covid hit the following year. To this day there was never another conference, that was my one shot and I took it.

The talk got a great reception and from it I got offered a job to do VR research work. Another thing, my talk was on video games, I had never done any kind of VR development at this point. But I took it anyway. Now you might think this story is done, far from it. thing is the job didn’t exist yet. They were going to apply for this job to get funding from a university. So I had to wait for 5 months, trying to do odd jobs, staying in a cottage that was, not completely built yet and living off of my savings made from all my random freelance jobs hoping this job will actually materialise, and it did… for about six months. In six months I furiously built a prototype of Sophiatown project. When time ran out it was back to random jobs, this time managing a VR lab in the department of education. For a whole year my Sophiatown work lay fallow until we invited the Trevor Huddleston Museum to have a look at it. Again unknown to us, they have been trying to find someone to do a VR exhibition for them since 2018, we are already in 2022 at this point, so these two things just linked up, but funds were limited. So kind of miraculously at the same time the university contacted me, someone who was at that talk spoke to other people about this project and I was offered funding to do a research on this and finish the experience. Since then I have been working on this project with the museums full support and the university’s financial support.

So it has been a wild, unexpected and humbling road, which is still very much ongoing. It often felt like all I do is pitch up, and if the idea has any traction and value to others, pitching up is all you need to do. That and being open to the twists and turns that simply ‘ pitching up’ will inevitably take you.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

Honestly, do not underestimate the power of youtube, youtube was and still is how I taught myself to code, 3D model and develop in VR, all for free. A lot of these help channels are also pretty small so the people making them are usually thrilled to talk to you and help you out if you need more help and need to dive deeper into something.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

One thing I keep learning over and over again is that, when it comes to history, you are wrong. You know nothing. History really is a kind of lie based on truth that we all end up agreeing on. History happened to real people, and real people are complicated and varied and they will disagree on things. That is history, not abstractions and objective facts in text books. Nothing is ever simple when it comes to history.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.glassbox3D.com
• Instagram: @izakfpotgieter
• Linkedin: Izak Frederik Potgieter

Image Credits
Izak Frederik Potgieter