Novembre Numérique 2025 - Redefining Reality
11 - 29 November 2025 at Alliance Française Nairobi, Kenya
Exhibiting Artists: Paula Karanja, Kevin Karanja (Atroklept), Natasha Khanyola, Leon Malu, Shadrack Munene, Ellie Obati ‘Kidd Volt’, Joanne Oluoch, Franck Vigroux and Antoine Schmitt
Redefining Reality is a group exhibition of audiovisual and experimental immersive digital art, curated as part of the international annual Novembre Numérique (Digital Cultures Festival) hosted by the Alliance Française Institutes.
Latent Mirror (2025) is an interactive, immersive experience that serves as a modern optical toy, inviting you to play with your own reflection through the lens of machine intelligence. It transforms a user's presence and movement into a live, evolving digital painting using real-time AI/ML diffusion. The system perceives the user via a Kinect 2 sensor and re-imagines their physical form through a high-frequency custom latent-space feedback loop. The project investigates the dialogue between human agency and machine hallucination. It orchestrates a narrative journey via a custom 8-state finite state
machine (FSM). You will get a conceptual version of the image that’s deeply tied to the model’s training data. The latent connects what it “sees” in the image to what it has “learned” over millions of examples, compressing visual content into a format that’s fast to process and rich with possibilities.
Co-created by Paula Karanja, Kevin Karanja (Atroklept) and Natasha Khanyola. (Available upon request).
Novembre Numérique 2024 - Immersive Futures Lab
18 - 24 November 2024 at Alliance Française Nairobi, Kenya
Opportunity Makers: Michele Ziegler (France), Mathieu Gayet (France), Arome Ibrahim (Nigeria), Med Arbi Soualhia (Tunisia), João Roxo (Mozambique).
Director: Joséphine Derobe and Small Creative Studios (France).
Co-produced by Fallohide Africa and the Alliance Française de Nairobi, and supported by the French Government's Création Africa initiative and the Institut Français.
The selected Kenyan participants embodied a balanced mix of gender, expertise, and creative vision. The carefully curated group enhanced the success of the Immersive Futures Lab by fostering collaboration, innovation, and impactful storytelling in XR technologies.
Paula Karanja served as a Creative Producer and Co-curator of Novembre Numérique 2024 in collaboration with Fallohide Africa.
Common Ground by New Comma 2023
25th of May, 2023. Carnaby, London at My Runway Group
This was the inaugural exhibition of My Runway Group's New Comma. Curated in celebration of African Union Day on the 25th of May, 2023. The event included an art exhibition, pop-up shops, a creative identity workshop, music performances and an open mic session.
PNGS Only!
29th October 2022 at iHub Kenya, Senteu Plaza, Nairobi, Kenya
Exhibiting Artists: Paula Karanja, Felix Attari, Michelle Pike and Joshua Mwavita
PNGs Only! is an initiative that provides digital artists with a platform to connect and learn from one another, as well as showcase their work in Augmented Reality. A Fallohide Africa and iHub Kenya effort. This first initiative took the form of a 4-week boot camp where 4 digital artists would come to get training on how to incorporate Augmented Reality into their digital work. Spearheaded by Fallohide Africa, an Extended Reality Creative Studio, the inaugural cohort received training on how to adapt their artworks for Augmented Reality.
The Tangu Utotoni (2022 - present) is an animated three-part augmented reality series of digital illustrations developed as part of MKOKO, an interactive narrative experience in Virtual Reality and an Augmented Reality Book project, currently in co-production with Fallohide Africa and Paula Karanja.
Zandra Rhodes Gallery, UCA, Rochester, in 2016
Michael Joseph Art Centre, Nairobi, Kenya, in 2016
Saatchi Gallery, London, UK, in 2017
Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, in 2018
MASK artists: Paula Karanja, Churchill Ongere, Fahima Munene, Edwin Wainaina, Samson Lazima Jali, Louis Tamlyn, Alan Kiptoo and Shela Foster
UCA animators: Emily Clarkson, Steven Payne, Samantha Niemczyk, Ethan Shilling, Vikki Kerslake and Nat Urwin.
In 2015, eight winners of the MASK Awards 2015 from Kenya collaborated virtually with six animation graduates from the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) in Rochester, UK, on an innovative project titled ‘Transformation/Mabadiliko’, transforming seven traditional artworks —including paintings, drawings and installations—into dynamic animations, shifting the focus from static art to interactive, immersive learning experiences.
What the Noise Gave Me (2016) (Mixed media on paper, fabric, and gel pen) Paula Karanja.
What the Noise Gave Me (2016) (Digital video 1:05) is an animated project in collaboration with Paula Karanja and Vikki Kerslake.
An experimental digital video film about the movement of line and texture from the vibrations of mental noise between two bodies. The sound design is a heavy bass beat on a loop, while the figures come alive, contemplating their writing.