Do Ancestors Dream of Electric Sheep? African Diasporic Visions of Time and Machine Intelligence

This paper explores how African diasporic futurist artists, such as Geraldo Oliveira and Alexis Chivir-Ter Tsegba, are using AI and generative technologies to transform colonial archives. In their work, bodies are isolated from ethnographic photographs, algorithmically recombined, and embedded within cosmic, speculative landscapes. These technological interventions disrupt linear, documentary notions of time, making the archive a living field where past, present, and future co-constitute one another. Moreover, by centering African ritual temporalities—rooted in event-driven, cyclical, and relational understandings of time—their art mirrors the recursive logic of algorithmic systems. In doing so, their work critiques colonial frameworks that imposed linear, hierarchical temporalities and reveals how African conceptions of time provide a vital lens for reconfiguring archives and digital systems, fostering a more expansive, interconnected, and relational experience of temporality.