Malik Afegbua: The Digital Artist Using Extended Reality To Tell African Stories

Since blockchain and Extended Reality (XR) (augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR)) gained prominence as the next big thing in technology, designers have been launching into the space to explore the benefits of the immersive technologies changing our experience and how humans interact with it in the digital space. Malik Afegbua, a Nigerian digital artist, who saw the endless possibilities the technology offers storytellers and how it could help push African narratives also took advantage of the new technology to create a fashion show that gave the elderly a sense of belonging in the fashion world.

“It took me three or four hours to make the fashion show for the seniors,” Malik Afegbua told me on January 22, 2023, when we got on a Zoom call to talk about ‘The Elder Series’ a fashion show he created in December 2022 to change society’s perception of older people.

The Elder Series is an Artificial Intelligence art series that showcases elderly African people living life, whether it’s strutting down a fashion runway in Afrocentric designs or having fun on a beach. The picture series went viral with over 300,000 likes after it was posted on Instagram on December 11, 2022.

Although the aim of his viral work was to open the world’s mind to accept the elderly in unconventional settings, he told Essence that it was inspired by a personal experience. For Afegbua who sees creativity as a form of therapy, creating the groundbreaking AI piece that denotes that old age is not the end was his way of responding to the challenge he was facing when his mother suffered multiple strokes in early 2022.

Afegbua who sits atop as the CEO of Slickcity media – a media value chain committed to telling African stories with every available medium said he had one goal in mind when he created ‘The Elder Series’ – he wanted to use storytelling to change perceptions as he does with all of his work as an artist and virtual reality curator.

“There is a perception we have in society that elderly people should just be at home or retire. There is no sense of belonging in different sectors – From fashion to sports, to many things, and I am sure they would love to be a part of. That’s one of the reasons why I started creating things about the elderly, and a fashion show was part of that,” Afegbua told me.

So, where does fashion intersect with XR for Afegbua? Well, before he started working with new media, he was a fashion enthusiast who had covered runway shows, understood the creative side of it, and saw fashion as a medium of expression – a medium he does not think is exclusive to young people.

“I was simply saying that you don’t have to look a certain way because you’re old. I wanted them to look royal, regal, and confident.”

Malik Afegbua who dreams aloud of a world where people are not relegated from society’s centre stage because of their age, employs Extended Reality as a tool fo art-making after mastering the art of storytelling for 12 years and honing his tech skills for seven years. This was just after earning a degree in Business from the University of Surrey, England.

“Moving back to Nigeria was a 50-50 thing, when you are unsure about what you want to do and where you are going. But that has been the best decision because there are so many things to unlock in Africa, in Nigeria. I always say Africa is a blank canvas, and you can really make it wherever you want,” Afegbua said.

Before becoming the digital artist using tech to reshape the fashion world, he ran an online TV, Slickcity TV, which he started with a camera he was gifted by a friend.

“Drawing and watching cartoons when I was very young was my pastime, and I used to daydream. I always tell my friends I wonder how I got through primary school because I spent a lot of time in my head, and that’s why I could imagine things in a jiffy.”

Born in December 1985 to a pilot father and a business-oriented mother. The Afegbua family from Okpella in Etsako East Local Government Area of Edo State, comes from a long line of royalty. His great-grandfather Late Alhaji Abdulmalik Asekomhe Afegbua was the first Paramount Otaru of Okpella kingdom.

His connection with his heritage and passion for storytelling led him into media business.

“I used to go to events, interview upcoming artistes, and go to their houses – people that are now celebrities. It made my company back then look like we were bigger than we were. We were like a red carpet event company.”

When his company rebranded to Slickcity, a new media company that shoots documentaries, TV shows, and TV commercials for brands like Bet9ja, Olode & Thread. In September 2021, Slickcity shot an exclusive feature with award-winning novelist, Chimamanda Adichie for BABEL Swedish national television.

Aside from shooting commercials and documentaries, in 2022, Malik Afegbua shot his first film ‘Jungle’ a social justice film that centres on love and justice which screened at the 2022 Africa International Film Festival (AFRIFF).

“Jungle is a corporate social responsibility film, and it’s really about jungle justice. It’s not what I would normally do with the kind of films that I’ve written that usually have many layers. This was like a direct story, but that’s because I was talking about a particular issue which was jungle justice.”

So what stories does Malik Afegbua tell with his platforms? Stories that highlight history and expose Africans to lost knowledge.

In 2023, he would be releasing a biopic on Nike Davies Okundaye, the founder of Nike Art Gallery, a perfect example of the kind of stories he tells. He said, “We had some very interesting reenactments of her life because she has very interesting stories to tell about her life growing up and what a lot of people don’t know about.”

With stories like hers, Malik Afegbua uses technology as a medium to reimagine and reinvent history to tell these purely African stories better.

“What I’m working on now is I’m trying to reimagine lost historical sites, lost heritage, things that have been lost to war, lost to natural disasters, just lost cultures using virtual reality so it’s very intentional when I’m telling stories. It has to always do with our roots, and the media has a very strong role to play when it comes to changing the world and shifting mindsets and shaping the world, and that has to do with storytelling as well.”

However great these stories and the medium he intends to tell are, there is still a threat posed to his dreams, the acceptability of these technologies in our world, and the risk investors have to take to even consider his projects. In 2019, the XR market was projected to reach $209 billion by 2022, eight times what it was in 2019, but its acceptability appears to be low in Africa. According to the 2022 Africa XR Report, government policy and finding businesses to use extended reality are some of the biggest challenges of the technologies in Africa.

“It’s not been easy to try and preach it because most people understand virtual reality as gaming, and entertainment, but there’s a lot more than that when it comes to education, training, medicine, and tourism. There is so much more that we can explore that have solutions for our country, communities, and many sectors. So, hopefully, people and companies will start gravitating towards that this year or next year like the other parts of the world are already doing. But up until now, it’s still a growing technology, and it’s kind of slow, hopefully, it will pick up.”

Although there are organisations, like Meta, offering grants and organising programmes like the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival, where Afegbua was shortlisted to showcase his art alongside other artists across Africa – there are no direct policies that are helping the XR space grow on the continent.

Surprisingly artists are also part of the bunch of sceptics who do not believe that using technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be considered art. When the fashion show for the seniors became viral on social media, it raised conversations on how AI kills the originality of art, a notion Afegbua does not believe in.

“I’ve always said it’s a tool that could be used ethically or unethically. We understand how the algorithm works already, we understand that it’s possible for you to go and take up many people’s artwork to create something. When you know that, you would try to avoid it because this AI is actually powerful. You could create things that don’t actually exist by just using the likeness of something.

“For instance, a black man is just a black man’s features but when you say I want to create something that looks like a van Gogh then you’re stealing art, you’re stealing other people’s work. There are many artists that have that data online that you could drag from, and support, the flip side of that is all these other traditional artists as well can use this technology to enhance their current workflow to make it faster because it could just be an inspiration behind before they ever start drawing.”

He establishes the although AI gives people an opportunity to create, everyone can’t, because not everyone can be an artist. “What AI gives you is always random, but when you direct it to what you actually want it to be then it becomes something. It all depends, it’s just a tool,” he said.

According to the digital artist, perception has to change because the future is tech, and eventually innovation always wins. His career is a perfect example of that. From a sketch artist to a photographer and now a digital artist using cutting-edge technological applications to tell important stories, Afegbua believes his commitment to exploring the possibilities tech has to offer him as an artist is opening doors of opportunities for him.

Aside from being a creative, he is a father and a husband. He is married to Ese Lami Afegbua, a creative writer who writes screenplays. When I asked about his wife, he chuckled as he shares the story of how he met her. “I was looking for a writer for one of the TV shows that I was working on back then for DStv, and I asked a friend of mine. A friend introduced me to her,” he said.

Although he appears to be reeling in his recent global acceptance of his work, there is still more to come as he revealed. Afegbua told me he is ready to have new conversations, exhibitions, and even a real fashion show might come up. Also, projects he has directed and co-produced alongside Netflix, like Made by Design seasons 2 and 3, would be released in March on Netflix, with a possibility of a Hollywood project.

We simply await the stories that he is willing to tell with his forthcoming projects.