Toguna World

Pierre-Christophe Gam

TOGUNA World is an ever-expanding laboratory of dreams dedicated to the investigation of the future. It is built around “The Sanctuary of dreams”, an immersive mixed media art installation, designed to help us envision through a participatory workshop, the kind of future we want.

Check out the prototype here.

Concept

Speculative thinking

Lucid dreaming

Ancient African spiritual tradition called IFA

Mozilla Hub

Photography

Adobe creative suite

Film

Unity

TOGUNA WORLD is the culmination of 10 years of research, spent creating works and hosting cultural experiences in and outside of the African continent, as a means of interrogating the future.

Blurring the lines between Art, design, technology, science and spirituality, it is a labor of love, many years in the making. Its vision was developed in 2019, through a series of future workshops organized across Kenya and Ghana, for 600 thinkers, dreamers and doers, from the worlds of Art, design, technology, science, agriculture, religion. Its development was done over the last two years, working with researchers, developers and traditional artisans across Kenya, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Paris, London and Berlin.

Process

TOGUNA WOLRD was developed through a series of immersive future-dreaming workshops organized in 2019 in Kenya as part of the African Crossroad and in Ghana, as part of the Year of Return.

The development of the digital platform was done through 2022.

It is comprised of three sections:

The Dream Hub: Accessible via a browser or using a VR headset, it is a digital temple nested within a dream-like primordial garden. It serves as a meditation space, introducing visitors to the core philosophy behind TOGUNA.

The Dream Lab: Best experienced using the browser, the Lab is where the future-dreaming workshop takes place. It is housed within an alternative version of the Hub, only accessible via invitation and limited to 16 participants per session.

Togunaworld.com: Established as a place to introduce the concept, experience the artistic style and map out the ideas explored in the installation and its webXR representation, the website is designed to visually archive the findings from the future-dreaming workshops (augmented with podcast interview, essay, film and Art). It aims to become the first global archive of dreams about the future

Following the launch of the online installation on the 20th of January 23, I will start working on a mapping project of dreams, to investigate how people across 5 major African cities (Lagos, Addis Ababa, Dakar, Kigali and Johannesburg) dream of the future. Partnering with different cultural institutions across the continent, I will invite a carefully selected group of innovative thinkers and doers to take part in the future-dreaming workshops.

Organized by cities, each dream map will consider 5 ideal visions of community, food production and distribution, human and nature relationship, spirituality and human collaboration. The findings from the future-dreaming workshops will be translated visually augmented with podcast interview, essay, film, Art…

From September of this year, I will join MIT as an Open doc lab fellow where I will work on the creation of a metaverse environment (Webxr / Mozilla Hub), informed by the findings from the future-dreaming workshops. It will introduce five distinctive visions of dreams, considering how we will love, dream, eat, pray and collaborate in the future.

Future

In spite of the numerous structural challenges looming over our societies, such as global warming, the AI revolution, the automation of the labor workforce and the growing wealth gap, the conversation around the future of our world has so far been largely restricted to and driven by the financial interests of Big tech and Big finance. If we listen to the predictions of thinkers such as Yuval Noah Harari, modern societies are doomed to slowly transition into an Orwellian nightmare, a neo-feudal global technocracy controlled and ruled by Big Tech overlords and the only option left to the 99%, will be to adapt or face the risk of becoming obsolete.

My conviction is that in order to create the future we want, we must invest in our individual and collective ability to imagine and dream beyond the internalized limitations of our present conditions.

Dreams are the foundation upon which reality is manifested! Beside nature and the visible and invisible laws of the cosmos, everything that exists in our world was once an idea, an immaterial thought, which evolved and grew to become something we can touch, see, hear, smell or feel. What we have been conditioned to perceive as a fixed and finite reality is nothing more than the sum of arbitrary conventions, embedded through centuries within the fabric of our lives.

Those who control and shape the stories we tell ourselves and the perception we have of the world, own our present and potentially our future…

TOGUNA WORLD is designed to act as an accelerator of the imagination. Its intended goal is to help us regain control of our individual story, by tapping into the power of our imagination to envision and experience what life could look like in the context of an ideal future.

Its vision is informed by the concept of the African Renaissance. First articulated by the renowned Senegalese historian and scientist Cheikh Anta Diop in a series of essays between 1946 and 1960, it considers the ways through which the continent will emerge from the brutal legacy of slavery and colonialism to achieve total economic, social and spiritual restoration, and rebuild from its original, pre-colonial paradigm, a renewed, thriving and enlightened civilisation

My aim is for TOGUNA WORLD to provide a space where people can dream positively about the future they want and start seeing themselves as active agents in charge of the destiny of their lives.

I too want to investigate as part of my research on dreams about the future, how we could envision a more human and community centric way of capitalizing on the “surveillance economy”.