Johannesburg’s Fak’ugesi African Digital & Innovation Festival returns from 13–17 October 2026 with a programme that feels especially alive to the evolving worlds of immersive media, digital culture, and fulldome storytelling. Now in its 13th year, the festival brings artists, researchers, technologists, filmmakers, educators, game makers, and audiences into a shared space across Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct, Origins Centre, the Wits Anglo American Digital Dome, and other venues in Braamfontein’s creative circuit. What makes Fak’ugesi stand out is not simply its breadth, but the way it treats immersive work as part of a larger cultural ecosystem: archives, AI, gaming, music, heritage, performance, and experimental film all sit in conversation.
This year’s theme, African Imaginaries, gives the festival a strong curatorial identity while keeping the doors open to experimentation. Rather than presenting immersive work as a niche showcase, Fak’ugesi positions it as a tool for memory, creative invention, and future-building. That approach is particularly relevant for fulldome and XR practitioners, because it frames immersive cinema not as a technical novelty, but as a medium for cultural transmission and public imagination.
One of the most revealing ideas in the programme is the framing of the festival through “three curatorial frequencies: Memory Engines, Imagination Engines and Future Engines.” As the festival puts it, “Memory Engines asks how knowledge, history and cultural memory are preserved and transmitted,” while “Imagination Engines focuses on creative practices through which alternatives are made possible.” The third strand, “Future Engines,” turns toward “systems, cities, technology and infrastructures through which possible futures are tested.” Taken together, these ideas suggest a festival that sees immersive work as both artistic practice and social inquiry.
That ethos is echoed in the keynote and panel lineup. Molemo Moiloa’s talk, “We Are the Future’s Ancestors,” signals the festival’s commitment to restitution, heritage, and land justice, while Dr Benjamin Rosman’s “The Intelligence Century and Why Africa Must Help Invent It” points to a broader conversation about who shapes emerging technologies. The festival also makes space for more poetic and speculative thinking, with Monika Bielskyte’s “DISOBEDIENT EDGES: Storyworld Design for Embodied Futures” and Dr Tsosheletso Chidi’s “The Languages We Imagine into the Future” helping to define Fak’ugesi as a meeting point between cultural theory and forward-looking media practice.
For fulldome and immersive audiences, the most exciting programming sits in the interplay between exhibition and experience. “Futures_Past: Amplifying Memory with Immersive Technologies” brings together six immersive exhibitions, using sound, moving image, interactive media, and XR to turn Southern African histories into sensory encounters. The festival also includes “COSMOCENO 2026: International Networked Visual Music Festival” at the Wits Anglo American Digital Dome, a sign that fulldome continues to expand through audiovisual performance and experimental visual music. Works such as “Umfula: Echoes of the River” and the ongoing “Beads as Bytes” installation show how the festival is grounding high-tech presentation in local knowledge systems and embodied cultural forms.
Several sessions also point to the industry’s current pivot toward education, simulation, and participatory creation. Dr Sechaba Maape’s “The City is Learning,” described as an interactive simulation where audiences redesign a city precinct using AI-assisted tools, reflects a growing appetite for immersive civic storytelling. At the same time, the gaming and hackathon elements — including Women Game Jam South Africa, Game Jam Plus South Africa, and the AI & Music in Africa Business Hackathon — underline how the festival is nurturing the next generation of creators through hands-on production rather than passive consumption.
For creators and venue operators, Fak’ugesi offers a clear signal: audiences increasingly expect immersive experiences to carry cultural meaning, not just visual spectacle. The festival’s mix of heritage, AI, animation, gaming, and fulldome programming suggests that successful immersive work in 2026 is likely to be interdisciplinary, locally grounded, and participatory. For artists considering submission or collaboration, that is encouraging. For venues, it is a reminder that programming can build deeper audience engagement when it connects spectacle to story, and technology to identity.
In that sense, Fak’ugesi is more than a festival line-up. It is a useful snapshot of where immersive media is heading: toward richer collaborations, broader public relevance, and a fuller definition of what digital storytelling can be.
Originally reported by via www.wits.ac.za on 2026-10-07 23:46:00.
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