Dzata: The Institute of Technological Consciousness is a creative research project by South African artists Russel Hlongwane, Francois Knoetze, and Amy Wilson. In fabricating a fictional institute and its archive, the artists imagine vernacular technological practices operating across the African continent. The artists embed archival footage and 3D scanned elements within game-engine and AI-generated pixel landscapes to traverse new geopolitical imaginaries: with portable ‘backpack laboratories,’ the crop field, smelting furnace, forest or river becomes a mobile laboratory, a workshop. 

The project title comes from the ancient capital of the Venda kingdom in the northern part of South Africa, which houses ruins built of blue stone in a style reminiscent of an architectural and technological wonder, the Great Zimbabwe ruins. 

Drawing on the research of project mentor and leading technopolitical scholar Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, this work spans research, workshops, performance, sculptural and video work in an attempt to shift the image “African data” in the technological imagination. The creation of a set of prototypes called “objects of power,” which embody acts of assembly, reinvention, translation, and innovation, form part of a mobile museum. 

In the project’s conception of modernity, we ask:

a) how can we draw examples from history which illuminate the invention of modernities from within, rather than received from elsewhere?

b) finding none available to us in the internet’s archive (because this archive exists in the everyday or the oral), how can we use AI and hybrid forms of animation and video-making to fabricate our own examples? 

This research is grounded in an effort to map the historical landscape of technopolitics on the continent. In examining the failure of large-scale post-independence African techno-industrial projects, the monuments and mausoleums of failed technological projects become sites of experimentation and spaces for future knowledge production.