Category South Africa

Dream Technologies and Ancestral Images: Reimagining Digital Art as Cultural Repair

Dream Technologies and Ancestral Images: Reimagining Digital Art as Cultural Repair

"Nice Aunties’ work hints at a future for digital art that is more human, more ritualised, and more ancestrally grounded. Cobb and Slattery provide the philosophical scaffolding; Khoi and San traditions offer the ethical and imaginal inheritance; dream technologies, fictional or real, show how images are medicine. What emerges is a powerful proposition: digital art can become a contemporary dream cave—an imaginal commons for healing, memory, and cultural repair."

The Quiet Extractive Machine: How Soft-Power Art Non-Profits are Rewriting Africa’s Future in VR

The Quiet Extractive Machine: How Soft-Power Art Non-Profits are Rewriting Africa’s Future in VR

There is a new kind of extractive industry rising quietly across the African cultural landscape—nothing as obvious as mining, nothing as brutal as the colonial museum raid. Instead, it arrives with friendly logos, “innovation labs,” creative grants, workshops for emerging storytellers, and the promise of global visibility.

Designing a Regenerative Cultural Economy

Designing a Regenerative Cultural Economy

"When values-aligned actors begin to acquire digital works from the Art Stoke Commons ecosystem, they don’t just support individual artists - they validate a new logic of cultural production. Each successful Hive becomes a proof-of-concept. Each replication, a new node in a growing network of islands of coherence. If it works in South Africa where the wounds of inequality and the hunger for cultural healing are deep, it can serve as a blueprint for global cultural resurgence in the digital age."

Future Trajectories: Navigating the Commons Economy in South Africa

Future Trajectories: Navigating the Commons Economy in South Africa

The Commons Economy is a vision of society that prioritizes individual freedom, data sovereignty and ecological stewardship. Here, communities thrive in a network of decentralized systems where technology is used to empower, not exploit. Governance is shared, privacy is protected and resources are allocated to support collective well-being.