XR and African Space Makers: Economic, Cultural, and Political Perspectives
In this talk, BlackRhino VR Co-Founder and African XR pioneer Brian Afande will discuss the status of the African XR ecosystem and the process behind international co-productions such as the VR project African Space Makers. He will also share the challenges and opportunities that arise when working with African XR companies and artists, according to African XR entrepreneurs. Following, media researcher and African Space Makers Co-Producer Vincenzo Cavallo will address cultural and political issues including how and why psychogeography has unconsciously been used by XR urban storytellers. He will also discuss some of the preliminary findings emerging from a series of interviews conducted with MIT ODL researcher Andrea Kim exploring the use of 360 videos by African XR artists to address topics such as space occupation in Johannesburg, space division in Lagos, and space making in Nairobi.
Brian Afande is the co-founder of Kenyan based Black Rhino VR, a virtual reality production company with a desire to make Africa’s unique experiences and cultural heritage accessible to everyone in the world through the power of VR. As an early African XR adopter, Afande envisions designing, democratizing and demystifying what Extended Reality (XR) and new emerging technologies will look like and how they will impact communities. Afande believes that democratizing access to these technologies is a key ingredient to building awareness around the potential of what the youth in Africa can achieve.
Vincenzo Cavallo is the CEO of Cultural Video Production, Co-Founder of The Nrb Bus Collective, and a postdoctoral affiliate at Oxford University’s Program in Comparative Media Law and Policy (PCMLP). Cavallo is also an author who writes, directs, and experiments with different formats, and a media entrepreneur that tries to develop new sustainable business models to support the production of stories that are socially, culturally, politically, and artistically relevant.
Our lecture series is made possible by generous support from the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, and MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative.