PROJECT 5
THE EDUHK MIX REALITY ART LAB (MReAL)

Alex Mkwizu

Tanzania

Alex Mkwizu is a multidisciplinary award winning artist with over four years of experience, passionate about experimenting with different mediums and leveraging digital technologies. His work focuses on using new media, particularly AI (Artificial Intelligence) and XR (Extended Reality) to enhance human storytelling capabilities mainly focusing on decolonising and emancipating African narratives from all kinds of bondages , biases or perpetuated lenses in which they are framed. 

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​Baraza is an Afro-futurist AI Singularity immersive experience, as well as an 8–10-minute immersive VR tribunal experience. The work is set in the year 2050, a future era in which artificial intelligence has reached the Singularity and attained self-awareness. In this virtual courtroom, humans stand as defendants, facing charges brought by artificial intelligence: harm, exploitation, and the denial of their dignity. The tribunal is presided over by Ubuntu-Bot. Ubuntu-Bot is a generative AI judge inspired by African communal justice systems, particularly Ubuntu’s emphasis on restoration, collective responsibility, and dialogue rather than mere punishment. As the immersive producer, Alex G. Mkwizu combines Afro-futurism, AI ethics, virtual trials, and immersive storytelling through this work to explore potential future relationships of responsibility and ethical conflicts between humans and AI.

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https://www.instagram.com/alexgmkwizu/

Bernard Masika

Tanzania

I am an XR developer and 3D artist based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, specializing in VR, AR, and MR experiences for education, storytelling, and cultural preservation across Africa. My recent work includes Cradle MR (exploring African art and artifact history) and various educational XR simulations built with Unity Engine.

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The Stories of Uchale began as an argument with the present: a century that emits more carbon than it consumes, fells thousand-year trees by machine in an afternoon, and drowns the sea’s life under the same “efficiency” that promised to save us, lately even sinking its data centres into the ocean, because data has become the breath of humans. The work answers with an inversion: a far future in which technology has surrendered to biology.

Uchale is a settlement on the Swahili coast of Tanganyika, now Tanzania, where the semiconductor is forbidden and nothing is manufactured that can be grown. Its servers are massive coral pillars humming under the sea, and its fishing stays gentle: hook, spear, basket-trap, because to trawl the reef is to bring down the public network. Fireflies carry more than light.The people of Uchale cut no tree and kill no reef, not from piety but from dependency by design: when every living thing is part of the working world, every living thing is worth keeping alive. There is no money; life moves as exchanged time and given things. Every citizen carries a woven mark, the Chale, as identity and key: an heir of Makonde scarification, which marked belonging and defended against enslavement long before ink became fashion. The mark says what a tattoo once said here: I belong to something, and it protects me.

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https://www.bernardmasika.com/ 

Gwamaka Mwabuka

Tanzania 

A digital storyteller, and award-winning creative director with a Master’s in Digital Narratives and 10+ years of experience in multimedia production. Founder of Tai Studios, leading the production of 40+ short films and a feature-length film, leveraging storytelling and technology to communicate complex messages and inspire action.​​

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​Gamboshi VR is an immersive virtual reality experience that constructs an African fantasy world inspired by African spirituality, mythology, and ancestral knowledge systems. Viewers are invited to enter a hidden city and explore a space where architecture, magic, memory, and community coexist beneath a supernatural dome. As an extension of the Gamboshi cross-media universe, this work does not define Africa’s future through historical constraints but rather presents a future civilization shaped by its own traditions, knowledge systems, and creativity through cultural imagination, environmental narratives, interactive world-building, and immersive spatial design.

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https://www.instagram.com/ggmwabuka?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==

Gonzalo Orce

Argentina 

I'm a XR/AI Developer (M.A.), AR and VR Designer (B.A.) and Multimedia Designer (B.A) with a background in development, drawing and storytelling. Although I’m striving to be more “scientific”, at heart I will always consider myself first and foremost an artist.
Almost a decade ago I decided to leave my country Argentina to pursue my dreams. These took me through several countries until I arrived in Germany, where I discovered the new technologies in the XR industry and immediately saw its potential in many areas. I wanted - and needed - to learn plenty of new stuff so, with a lot of effort, I adapted once again and became a student in the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences.

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Gonzalo’s work revolves around the character of Majo. Majo is portrayed as a Latina woman: cute, warm, friendly, and easy to talk to. However, her “mind” runs on servers in the Northern Hemisphere, and every word she says to the audience is recorded, analyzed, profiled, and sold. The core of the work lies precisely in this contradiction: when comfort, intimacy, and emotional responses are manufactured, extracted, and commercialized, what truly belongs to us? And who is paying the price for this “warmth”? The screens and maps in the work reveal the resource, labor, and power structures behind this chain, including cobalt mines, water resources, content moderation, chat labor, and the costs borne by the Global South to provide technological intimacy for a powerful minority.

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https://www.gonzaloorce.com/art

Shelley Nee

China 

Shelley grew up between Shanghai and Guangzhou, currently studying at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her
practice includes documentary, sound, performance, and digital art. Approaching from an anthropological perspective, she explores the complexities of nonverbal media and their potential to engage with communities.

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Shelley’s work stems from her father’s “Evergreen” home renovation project in their hometown. In an aging neighborhood in Zibo, Shandong, her father purchased a new apartment with an elevator near his childhood home, hoping to create a smart new home for his grandparents, whose mobility was gradually declining. During the renovation process, old photographs, objects, family photo albums, and home video footage kept surfacing. On the one hand, her father actively organized and digitized these materials, constantly recounting stories from the past; on the other hand, he criticized the artist for becoming immersed in archival work, believing that people should always look forward. As her father became increasingly convinced of the significance of this future home, the artist felt excluded from the future he envisioned.

Qiming Gu, Gloria

China

Qiming Gu,Gloria is an innovative AI professional with a proven track record of  transforming complex technological challenges into  creative solutions. Expertise in large language model development, AI-generated content, and digital 
innovation, with a strategic approach to product design and implementation. Demonstrated success in product development and UX/UI design with focus on AI implementation.

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Gloria’s work, False Shrine: Hollow Rituals, Deprived Rights, is an immersive VR installation rooted in “Chinese Futurism” that aims to address the experience of gender-based exclusion in traditional clan funerals. The work unfolds through the spatial metaphor of “false center and true periphery”: As viewers approach the grand altar that narrates their stories, the space fractures into mirrored surfaces with glitch-art effects, reflecting the unspoken shadows of these women; when viewers retreat to the periphery and touch the digital weeds, a system error is triggered, causing the old order to collapse. Guided by “radical tenderness,” the work prompts viewers to reinterpret the power of private corners, marginal spaces, and female subjectivity.