Akili (ya) Bandia is a research studio working with machine learning as a cultural, historical, and political material.
Akili bandia is our favourite translation of artificial intelligence in Swahili, but it also names something made, provisional, and imitative. Something that performs intelligence without claiming to be natural, complete, au halali.
We embrace this condition, exploring intelligence as practice under uncertainity, shaped by care, refusal, improvisation, and imagination, especially in contexts marked by protest, language, surveillance, and uneven risk.
Based in Nairobi, Akili Bandia moves across code, maps, texts, simulations, and visual artifacts, treating computation as partial, situated, and learned through doing. Research here begins from attention, sio mastery.
For collaboration, contributions, research conversations, questions, or 'productive' yaps:
