Femi Johnson
Femi Johnson is a Digital Heritage Specialist at the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA), where he leverages science to preserve, interpret, and revitalize African cultural heritage. At the MOWAA Digital Lab, he joined efforts to digitally reconstruct the Benin Bronze Plaques and recreate their original 16th-century Audience Hall, piecing together fragments of history dispersed across global collections. This work bridges gaps between past and present, offering new insights into West Africa’s cultural legacy. Recognized internationally, Femi has served as a guest professor at the University of Arts Hamburg, where he investigated the intersection of impermanence, art, and science. He has also delivered lectures at the University of Zurich, Zurich University of the Arts, and Musee Theodore Monod Dakar etc. fostering interdisciplinary dialogue on heritage innovation. Femi contributed to Ars Electronica Festival 2023’s panel “Rebuild Together: Digital, Human, and Arts-Driven Innovation in Africa,” emphasizing collaborative innovation to reshape Euro-African narratives. He further advises on the STARTS4AFRICA Prize (2024–2025), guiding Africa-centric creative tech initiatives. Femi’s expertise has spurred collaborations with institutions including the Swiss Benin Initiative, Goethe Institute, Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford), German Archaeological Institute, National Commission for Museums and Monuments Nigeria, and the GAS Foundation, among others. His mission: to reclaim fragmented histories through technology, ensuring African heritage thrives in a digital future.
Public lecture "Ctrl + Shift + Retell"
Time and Place: 15 May 2025, 06.15–08:00pm, Unitobler, Lerchenweg 36, room F013
Moderation: Prof. Dr. Elize Mazadiego (Institute of Art History, Universität Bern)
What’s a world where we treat data not as a resource to mine, but as a story to retell? Ctrl + Shift +Retell posits archives, datasets, and patterns as collaborative acts of interdisciplinary knowledge-making, where artists, policymakers, historians, and technologists transmute data into living narratives that defy the necropolitics of ‘Big Tech’. This lecture argues that the current model of data extraction—rooted in colonial logics and control—can be disrupted through radical interdisciplinary praxis. By designing open-access, community-driven datasets, we forge new frameworks for understanding human experience, ones that prioritize sovereignty over surveillance and care over commodification. Building upon the idea that cultural lore, archives, and history survive when they are retold, we explore how data gains immortality not in static storage but through recursive, creative reuse—echoing mythic cycles where gods persist through reinterpretation. In our discussion, we integrate insights from music, history, religion, and filmmaking to illustrate how repetition, as a fundamental force, shapes our world. For marginalized communities—particularly African populations excluded from global datasets—this means reclaiming the right to digitize themselves. The lecture critiques the fallacy of “bigger data = better truth,” contrasting AI systems trained on Reddit’s data dump with local datasets rooted in an embodied experience. A grandmother’s recipe archive—digitized by her grandchildren and annotated with sensory memories (the smell of crayfish, the texture of a clay pot)—carries layers of meaning no LLM can scrape. Similarly, collaborations between policymakers and speculative artists—such as data sculptures that materialize climate migration statistics into 3D-printed topographies, or Refik Andol using data as pigment—demonstrate how multidisciplinary dialogue can make abstract numbers felt. Sustaining these counter-narratives requires more than critique—it demands new architectures of care and infrastructure. By reimagining data governance as a ritual rather than a resource, Ctrl+Shift+Retell reframes data’s purpose: not to feed algorithms, but to nourish collective memory.
Colloquium
Time and Place: 16 May 2025, 10.15am–05:00pm, Unitobler, Lerchenweg 36, room F-113
For PhD students, advanced Master students of the University of Bern, as well as interested parties
Part 1 of the colloquium is dedicated to the discussion of the lecture and the texts suggested by the guest. In Part 2, a core group present their PhDor postdoctoral projects, speaking for about 20 minutes (English) on how the concept of "Repetition" and related concepts/problems such as such as "continuity and discontinuity", "orignal and copy", or the proliferation of meaning through various techniques of repetition or reproduction connect to their research questions and which aspects of the texts are of particular relevance to their own work. The presenters raise questions for the discussion with their peers, which should contribute to the development of their thesis. Finally, in Part 3, the conversation will open up again so that the other PhD or advanced MA-students have an opportunity to address issues related to their projects
Readings colloquium:
Mandatory:
Asimov, Isaac 1956: The Last Question. In: Science Fiction Quarterly (November 1956), S. 7-15.
Gleick, James 2011: The information: a history, a theory, a flood. New York: Pantheon Books. S. 3-12 (prologue).
Hofstadter, Douglas R. 1981: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. London: Penguin Books Ltd. S. 127 – 156 (chapter 5).
Recommended:
Hofstadter 1981: S. 82-126 (chapter 4).
ECTS
1.5 (Pflicht- oder Wahlpflichtbereich ICS und GS / Wahlpflichtbereich SLS, SINTA, open to (post)doctoral students, advanced MA students at the University of Bern and further interested parties.
Language
English
Registration
from now on via KSL und E-Mail to michael.toggweiler@unibe.ch
