Ashraf Johaardien: A brief meditation on the rooms where decisions get made.

Three questions live inside the programme of Fak’ugesi 2026, running five days from 13 to 17 October: what survives? What is intelligence? Who builds the future? The full programme is announced today at Tshimologong.

At this afternoon’s launch, Festival Director Alby Michaels presents the five days in person, alongside live conversations with artists, technologists and thinkers from the programme. Among them is Frame by Frame, a discussion of AI, African photography and authorship with Ugandan photographer Evans Akanyijuka, who joins from Kampala. The launch is streamed live on Fak’ugesi’s Facebook page and YouTube channel.

Memory Engines carries the first question, how knowledge persists when power decides what counts as knowledge. The past survives through decisions about what gets archived, what stays retrievable and what a community chooses to hold.

Dr Tammy Hodgskiss treats the Origins Centre itself as a memory machine, reading galleries, libraries, archives and museums as places where selection turns into politics. Molemo Moiloa, co-founder of Open Restitution Africa, turns the frame around in “We Are the Future’s Ancestors”, arguing that restitution concerns authority as much as objects, the authority to decide what is kept, what is shown and what belongs to whom.

Canda Kincses activates immersive exhibitions drawn from Southern African histories, supported by the French Institute of South Africa. Material that usually sits in boxes and catalogues is staged as space, so visitors move through an archive instead of consulting it.

On Thursday 15 October, Imagination Engines moves the question forward in time. If the past is settled through systems, the future will be too. Professor Benjamin Rosman, named to TIME’s 2025 list of the 100 most influential people in AI, opens the day with his keynote, “The Intelligence Century and Why Africa Must Help Invent It”. His argument is that intelligence is made and designed, and that the real contest is over who gets to define it.

Tanushka Ramdin’s “Beads as Bytes” asks whose knowledge enters those systems and whose is left outside. Ndebele and Zulu beadwork encoded, transmitted and preserved information long before code meant software, yet computer science arrived with its own picture of what code looks like. Ramdin wants to know what other forms of intelligence we have missed because our definitions of knowledge were built to see something else.

On Friday 16 October, Future Engines turns the argument practical. Monika Bielskyte’s keynote, “Disobedient Edges: Storyworld Design for Embodied Futures”, takes on the futures already being sold to us, escaping the planet, engineering away the body, automating thought. A future designed only to avoid dystopia is still organised by dystopia, she argues, and the better work is to imagine constructively, treating the future as something to build.

Dr Sechaba Maape’s “The City is Learning” puts that into participants’ hands, an interactive simulation in which audiences redesign a city precinct with AI-assisted tools. The exercise exposes what the data leaves out. Transport data shows the routes people take but not their reasons, safety data records incidents but not the knowledge people use to move through unsafe streets, and property titles list every registered deed while missing the trader whose income never appears anywhere. Each gap is a place where a new line of inquiry can start.

Eiko Tanaka, co-founder and CEO of STUDIO4°C, was a line producer at Studio Ghibli on My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service before building her own studio, and has spent the decades since working through the tension between art and commerce. Her question is one of scale, which creative worlds a production structure can sustain, and what becomes possible when artists, technicians and institutions work at the same table.

Red Balloon Festival South Africa launches on Friday 16 October at the Origins Centre with its own hard question, “Whose Image? Whose Future?” Led by the founding team of Kipaji Lab South Africa, with partners Zuri Works, Kemoso Consulting and Zuri Productions, it asks who tells South Africa’s stories, who owns and profits from the image, whose documentation is archived and whose stories are allowed to circulate.

Also on Friday, the Wits Anglo American Digital Dome screens a fulldome journey through the Umfolozi River, combining aerial and underwater cinematography with spatial sound. A river can be mapped, measured and reduced to data, but inside the dome its scale becomes part of what you know about it.

Games test the same question from the inside. A game is a set of rules someone wrote, and playing one shows you how those rules shape what you can do. The AI & Music Business Hackathon, Tournament of Power, Red Bull Wings Cup and the game jams are where participants get to write the rules as well as follow them.

Saturday hands the tools over. Women Game Jam and Game Jam Plus South Africa are open to developers, artists, designers, writers, musicians and complete newcomers, and the fifth Fak’ugesi Awards recognise work across six categories: animation, video games, digital art, design, music and immersive media.

A shuttle links Tshimologong, the Origins Centre, Chris Seabrooke Music Hall and the Digital Dome, so students, families, schools, first-time visitors and working practitioners can each build their own route through the week.

None of this is settled in advance. The future gets built in rooms like these, by the people who turn up and the systems they choose to question, and Fak’ugesi spends five days doing that work in public.

The festival also treats itself as a system. “Prompt”, a live festival guide, lets you filter by strand, time and venue to build the day you actually want. TRANSMISSIONS, an interactive editorial FlowBook™ I prototyped during my residency, follows the ideas shaping the festival as they move through the week.

Both were developed alongside this year’s programme and launch with it, built into the work from the start. The questions they carry are the festival’s own: whose answers count, what stays invisible, and what happens when the model meets the world.

Ashraf Johaardien is the Resident Writer at Fak’ugesi African Digital & Innovation Festival 2026. His views are his own and do not represent those of the festival or its partners.

Ashraf Johaardien
ashrafjohaardien@me.com
M\e. Creatine
https://fakugesi.co.za/

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