Dreaming New Worlds is a Pan-African art and technology initiative to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration between artists, scientists, and creative technologists.
The programme is structured across four Pan-African nodes. Each node is focused on its sub theme but is free to be influenced by ideas from others. All work contributes to the overarching theme of Codes of Conduct.
- Node 1: Kenya, Tanzania, Togo; Ethics of Power
- Node 2: Nigeria, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso; Building Distributed Networks
- Node 3: South Africa, Ghana, Cote d’ Ivoire; Feminist & Ecological Governance
- Node 4: Namibia, Angola, Rwanda; Techno-Political Futures
Accepted collectives join a cohort of Pan-African fellows across all four nodes. They participate in shared online programming, knowledge exchange, and cross-node dialogue throughout the year.
There is a month-long intensive Lab taking place simultaneously across all nodes (July 2026) and there are public-facing programmes to sensitise and develop the community around the ideas and works of each collective (e.g. film screenings, panel discussions, workshops, artist talks, and civic roundtables).
The output will be a digital platform, a digital atlas, capturing processes, prototypes, discussions, and content that remains accessible beyond the project timeline—usable for research, education, and future collaborations.
Each collective should include at minimum:
- An artist or creative practitioner
- A technologist, scientist or engineer
- A researcher, thinker, or policy worker
The programme actively encourages collaboration across institutions, cities, countries (within the node) and disciplines. At least one collective member should be able to speak English.
Each node will select one multidisciplinary collective to receive a grant of 3,000 EUR. This collective will use the grant to research, develop, and produce a small- to medium-sized prototype that responds to the node’s sub-theme. To support collectives in deepening their research and strengthening their prototypes and connection between African countries, each collective may apply for up to two research travel trips within their node region during the program period (up to 3,000 EUR).
