Ian Mangenga

Ian Mangenga is a social designer and AI ethics & governance researcher whose work explores how algorithmic systems quietly shape identity, access, and power, with a particular focus on the experiences of African women. She is the founder of Digital Girl Africa, a community incubator advancing AI literacy and digital confidence for women across the continent.

Working across multimedia and design, Ian creates work that makes the invisible architectures of AI tangible. Her practice blends critical inquiry with creative expression, using film, visual storytelling, and spatial thinking to surface the material, political, and emotional contours of emerging technologies. She has consulted for UNICEF South Africa, the World Bank, Commonwealth Foundation, and CIVICUS, and her contributions to Africa’s digital futures have been recognised by the Mail & Guardian, the Web Foundation, and the Design Futures Lab.

She is currently completing an MA in AI, Ethics & Society at Birkbeck, University of London.

Project outline

Artificial Cartographies: Mapping the Spatial Contours of AI in Africa
A multimedia project interrogating the geographies of artificial intelligence across the continent.

They call it the cloud. But it lives in the ground.

Artificial intelligence is often imagined as invisible, immaterial, a weightless force hovering somewhere above us. Yet behind this phenomenon lies a deeply material world: land scarred by extraction, labour rendered ghostlike, cables stretched across oceans, minerals unearthed from ancient terrain, servers humming beneath fragile infrastructures. AI is not elsewhere. It is here, rooted in soil, bodies, and place.

Artificial Cartographies begins with this dissonance. It asks what becomes visible when we treat AI not as an abstraction, but as a geography, something with coordinates, landscapes, borders, and consequences.

This is a story about where AI touches down and what happens when it does: the frictions it creates, the worlds it reorganises, and the quiet, often overlooked terrains that hold up the global imagination of “the cloud",while reframing Africa as central, not peripheral, to the world's algorithmic future.

Through multimedia storytelling, visual research, and creative inquiry, the project traces these spatial entanglements across Africa, assembling a narrative that is as much about technology as it is about land, power, and the futures being built beneath our feet.