INTRA-ACTIONS #8: Dzata Institute of Technological Consciousness–Perform lecture by Russel Hlongwane

"Dzata: The Institute of Technological Consciousness" is a creative research project and film by South African artists Russel Hlongwane, Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson, within which they fabricate a fictional institute and its archive to imagine and demonstrate vernacular technological practices operating across the African continent. The institute’s scientists follow a sustained tradition of transcendentalists (iSanusi in isiZulu) – roaming figures who moved from kingdom to kingdom accumulating methods and ingredients for the sake of altering reality and accessing realms beyond our own. Their laboratories – sites of knowledge production – are crop fields, rivers and homesteads. We see how science, technology and innovation are part of an interlinked process of accumulative knowledge production that extends long into the past.

This video shows the performance lecture by Russel Hlongwane – in the role as the institute’s head scientist – in conversation with the Imminent and Eminent Ecologies exhibition, expanding upon the universe of the film and the artworks. Hlongwane brings the film and the artworks into conversation by weaving them together with storytelling, speculative fiction and academic texts. Along the way, where relevant, he demonstrates the objects of power from the institute’s archive.

Russel Hlongwane works in the production and assembly of culture, focusing on heritage, tradition, and modernity in South Africa. He moves between art-making (installation and film) and curating. His performance work serves as a bridge to transmit his academic interests to a broader audience, while his writing practice spans academia, policy and art journals.

Lo-Def Film Factory (Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson) is a DIY artist duo working across archival research, dramaturgy, and visual strategies using video art, collage, sculptural installation and virtual reality. The duo aims to create a space for storytelling through the democratisation of filmmaking via video, and they run workshops and collaborate with various communities, valuing the transmission of ideas and lived experience over high production values.

This project was supported by the Mozilla Foundation’s Creative Media Award (2022) and Mozilla Foundation Alumni Connection Grant (2024), and received the following awards: Award of Distinction (2024): STARTS Prize Africa (Ars Electronica); Honorary Mention (2023): Prix Ars Electronica – New Animation Award; Lumen Prize (2023): Global Majority Award; and Moving Image Art Prize Nominee (2023): Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin.

Intra-actions is a series of engagements that bring together scientists and technologists, bio-artists and -designers, legal and humanitarian practitioners, historians and anthropologists, architects, writers and curators to reflect on the intra-action of their work. Inspired by the visionary concepts of new feminist materialist theorist Karen Barad, the series fosters a deeper understanding of the entangled complexities of research and creative production beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and thereby functions to shape the research process itself.