Dzata: The Institute of Technological Consciousness is an artistic research project by South African artists Russel Hlongwane, Francois Knoetze, and Amy Wilson. In fabricating a fictional institute and its archive, the artists imagine centuries-old vernacular technological practices from across the African continent. Building on the research of technopolitical scholar and project mentor Professor Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, the work takes the form of video, a creative-critical text, sculptural masks, costumes and devices, and a youth workshop series. 

The video operates as an in-house media assemblage created for the preservation of the institute’s activities and ideas, unfolding the idea of development as a historical process Africans shaped. 

The project aims to foreground indigenous technological knowledge and to explore how science, technology and innovation are part of a long interlinked process of accumulative knowledge production which extends into the long past. 

As such, the work does not ‘invent something new' rather, it brings into conversation present thinkers, anti-colonial revolutionary practices, folklore and gadgetry. The collapsing of these ideas helps chart a wider framework from which to think about technology from the continent. 
The workshops, held with young people in South Africa (Cape Town, 2022) and Brazil (Salvador, 2023), are pop-up maker-spaces which position young people as creative innovators and inventors of their own technologies. The workshops invite youth to identify a challenge in their community, and to use electronic waste and other materials to create their own invention to address it. 

As members of the Dzata Institute we ask: how can we draw examples from history which illuminate the invention of modernities from within, rather than received from elsewhere? Or, finding none available to us, can we fabricate our own examples? How can we alter incoming modernities so that they speak native languages and advance our identities?