Unlearning Creativity and The Elder Series: AI Fashion Show - Mozilla Festival 2025

In a world where algorithms compose symphonies, AI models paint portraits, and machine systems remix culture at scale: what does it mean to be creative today? This conversation invites two visionary artists working at the edge of human and machine collaboration, Sougwen Chung and Malik Afegbua, to unlearn what we’ve been taught about creativity, authorship, and artistic bias.

The Elder Series was born out of Malik Afegbua’s grief after losing his mother, transforming personal loss into a powerful celebration of elders, their wisdom, resilience, and beauty. It began by using AI as a tool for good, reimagining how elders are seen and challenging ageist stereotypes, a bold innovation that earned Malik the WHO Global Game Changer Award. But the vision has since grown beyond technology: The Elder Series now lives on global stages as physical shows and exhibitions with real people, bringing communities together and sparking intergenerational dialogue. What started as healing has become a cultural movement, reminding the world that age is not decline, but a living archive of strength, creativity, and legacy.

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Featuring:

Malik Afegbua
Malik is an award-winning Nigerian filmmaker, contemporary artist, designer, and creative technologist recognized for pioneering work at the intersection of storytelling, culture, and technology. He is the Founder and CEO of Slickcity Media and Executive Director of Gener8, where he leads projects that merge African futurism, artificial intelligence, and immersive media to reclaim and reimagine African narratives. His viral project "The Elder Series" used AI to reimagine seniors in vibrant fashion shows, sparking a global dialogue about inclusivity. This earned him a Game Changer Award in 2023 and was recognized by the World Health Organization for its impact on perceptions of aging. Malik’s collaborations range from preserving African heritage through VR documentaries with Meta to projects with global brands such as Marvel Studios, Cadbury, and IBM. His multidisciplinary practice across film, fashion, Art, and extended reality positions him as a leading voice shaping Africa’s creative digital future.

Sougwen Chung
Sougwen 愫君 Chung is a Chinese-Canadian artist and researcher, widely considered a pioneer in human-machine collaboration – exploring the mark-made-by-hand and themark-made-by-machine as an approach to understanding the dynamics of humans and systems. Sougwen’s work MEMORY is part of the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and is the first AI model to be collected by a major institution. Recently, Chung was recognized as a Cultural Leader at the World Economic Forum, one of four recipients of the TIME100 Impact award, and named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI.