Joburg's Fak'ugesi festival asks what imagination does before innovation arrives

The 2026 Fak'ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival runs across five days, from 13 to 17 October, built around three curatorial strands, with Thursday, 15 October, dedicated to a programme called Imagination Engines.

The day is built around a simple but pointed question: before anything is invented, something first has to become conceivable – so what does imagination itself actually do? Dr Benjamin Rossman opens proceedings by asking why Africa must help invent what he calls the “intelligence Century”, pushing the debate beyond simple adoption of artificial intelligence and into who gets to define intelligence in the first place, and whether African participation in AI can mean more than consuming systems designed elsewhere.

A panel titled Art in Artificial Intelligence considers the artist as orchestrator once AI becomes part of the creative process, while a session called “Same Prompt, Different Planet” sees artists Dagmar Schürrer and Renzo Filinich Orozco use the same machine to produce markedly different work – illustrating that a shared technology does not produce a shared outcome, since the people using it bring different contexts to it.

Filinich Orozco extends the theme further in a session on plant-guided language evolution and machine “hallucination”, combining AI, plant intelligence, sound and ecology.

Dr Tsosheletso Chidi's session, on the languages imagined into technology's future, asks not merely whether African languages can be added to existing systems, but whether language changes those systems, and whose knowledge and concepts become legible to a machine built around assumptions that are not African.

The festival’s organisers frame this as testing a broader proposition: that imagination does not always precede innovation chronologically – invention often comes from necessity, constraint or accident – but that some possibility has to become conceivable before it can become an innovation.

That, in turn, requires conditions of its own: time, access, tools, education, connectivity, funding and audiences, alongside space for unfinished ideas that do not yet have to justify themselves as products. A festival cannot supply all of that, but it can, for a few days, temporarily alter the conditions under which artists, technologists and disciplines meet – configuring the field, as the organisers put it, in which possibility is negotiated, before anyone has decided what the resulting innovation should be called.

SOURCE: Artslinklink text