What The CAVIC Art & Tech Festival Reveals

The CAVIC Creativity & Technology Festival returned for its third edition last week, with the theme “Merging Realms: Beyond Boundaries,” which aimed to explore the merging of creativity and technology to produce new forms of storytelling, design, and cultural experience.

A new design and form of storytelling, and a different way of experiencing Nigerian culture, were achieved. Although it had its hits and misses, activities behind the festival’s exhibition, which is a visual-physical culmination of its theme, are of greater importance.

Hits

Comprising of eight art-tech installations including – ‘Onugbo ml’Oko’ (A Tale of Shadows and Brotherhood), an AI visual adaptation and projection of an Idoma folktale; a hunting game ‘Onugbo ml’Oko: The Hunt’, built off of that tale; ‘Reflections of Time’, a time-travelling experiential space, achieved via lights, mirror and music; ‘Can You Hear Me Now?’, an installation merging AI, the spoken word and a painting, and a painting installation by an artiste whose creative processes begins from the digital to the canvas.

Props must be given to the Mechatronics Engineer, Daniel Agbese, who is responsible for visualising the stories showcased in the exhibition.

Misses

There is room for improvement, as one must avoid a recurring scenario at the exhibition where some viewers of ‘Onugbo ml’Oko’ – in particular, the older generation – turned to exchanging pleasantries and catching up with old friends mid-view, and walked off the space unclear about what the story is about. They are not alone. A Gen Z audience also complained, “I don’t really understand the story”.

A key pointer here is knowing when to use AI 100% in achieving an artistic project and when not to. For instance, beyond deploying AI in the creation of characters, motions, and scenic changes, CGI can be used to enhance characters’ facial expressions. Meanwhile, sound effects experts and sound engineers can help match characters’ dialogues, facial expressions, and actions. The latter can also ensure the background music doesn’t overshadow the dialogue, thereby enhancing the clarity of the story and viewer experience.

The Future That Is Happening

What is happening behind the scenes of this exhibition matters more. While the exhibition is a team effort by both the artists and the technologists, Gabriel and Daniel Agbese’s expertise made the visual representation of the artistic envisions and viewer experience possible.

In a world where Africa is still grappling with the concept of AI and its underlying principles, the exhibition serves as proof that Nigerian youth are becoming an integral part of the process of building AI.

A huge gap in the AI world today is the absence of AI models trained on African culture or ecosystems. To achieve the projection, Mechatronics Engineer Daniel built and wrote the entire system, feeding it specific Idoma culture, clothing, folklore, and stories. A labour of love that took him a month to develop a single African character.

“Most AI are not trained on African material. If you ask it to generate a man walking down a road, its first inclination is to generate a white man walking down the road, because that’s what it’s trained on. Being able to build it myself, and feed it with the specific Idoma culture and story, is a much better way of creating, which ties back to the fact that AI cannot replace the artiste,” said Daniel.

With the likes of Daniel and Gabriel, the festival can further collaborations with individual artistes, groups or institutions via its incubation project, helping visualise artistic visions that heretofore may have seemed impossible.

This aligns with the festival’s goal this year, which the festival founder, Philip Agbese, stated is youth-centred. “What we are trying to do with the festival in general is to upskill creatives. This year in particular, we are trying to translate AI, how one can use it, and what one can make of it, which will open a lot of doors for our young creatives to enable them express themselves in ways they never could before, … to make meaning of their lives, earn a good living off it, and work in a global space. These young people are already plugged into the digital world, whether we like it or not. What we need to do is simply ensure that their plug-in is positive, and help them find value thereon.”

Besides, theatre-maker and founder of the Abuja International Theatre Festival and Awards (ABITFA), Jerry Adesewo, noted that despite the real cons of AI, the tool is best used to enhance creatives’ works and make the creative process or experience more efficient.

He believes that, like the internet before it, the present hullabaloo about AI will fade with time, and humans will develop the checks necessary to control its excesses.

“I believe in the next five years, the noise about AI will die down. Like a virus and an anti-virus, as AI expands, cautionary measures against it will evolve alongside it. Are we going to survive AI? Yes. The fears about it are plausible. But it is important to accept that it is a part of our system, and understand it.”