Dzata: The Institute of Technological Consciousness

Film screening by Russel Hlongwane, Francois Knoetze & Amy Louise Wilson

‘Dzata: The Institute of Technological Consciousness’ was screened in a loop during our Feeling Machines Weekender in Spring 2023 at Arnolfini‘s Auditorium alongside interactive installations within the space.

Part documentary, part poetry, this short film by South African artists Russel Hlongwane, Francois Knoetze, and Amy Louise Wilson fabricates a fictional institute and its archive, imagining vernacular technological practices operating across the African continent.

We’re so excited to share that since then, Dzata won the 2023 Lumen Prize Global Majority Award and received an honorary mention for Ars Electronica 2023!

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Image credit:

Ibi Feher

About the artists

Russel Hlongwane

Russel Hlongwane is a cultural producer based in Durban, South Africa. His work obsesses over the tensions in Heritage, Modernity, Culture and Tradition as it applies to black life. His said practice includes research, cultural production, design theory, writing, film and curatorship. He has shown work in extensively across Europe, Argentina, Japan and the United Arab Emirates as well as throughout South Africa

Francois Knoetze

Francois Knoetze is a scavenger, sculptor, performer, and video artist with an interest in the connections between social histories and material culture. His roaming costumed performances and experimental videos pick at the socio-spatial force-fields that attempt to rigidly order the contaminated, folded, and entangled worlds of people and things. His videos create narrative portraits of the uncertainty in the nervous system of a global digital machine at the brink of collapse.

Amy Louise Wilson

Amy Louise Wilson is a South African actor, writer, and digital storyteller.