Within By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road, the programme moves between time-bound moments of collective convergence (High Tide) and modes of exchange grounded in proximity rather than spectacle – through conversation, listening, tinkering, and co-presence (Low Tide). Some discursive events will activate the festival spaces as charged nodes of attention and encounter, while others invite a more informal state of shared holding.

As a yearly prelude to the festival, this year’s Marshall McLuhan Lecture brings together Scott Benesiinaabandan and Lucas LaRochelle , moderated by Camila Lombana Diaz , through a recursive conversational format addressing AI sovereignty and pluriversal intelligences.

The desktop-lecture-performance Bedrot With Me by İdil Galip (founder of the Meme Studies Research Network) leads a collective experiment in doing almost nothing. The session is an invitation to lay and scroll together, daydream and drift off, rest in stasis. In it, the private ritual of bedrotting and the semi-private act of parallel play exist in the same space.

Shaheer Tarar will present two works in different formats, exploring how computational infrastructures shape images and worldviews. His video game essay-lecture The Compression Zone examines compression algorithms as key engines of contemporary world-making, merging autobiography, archival research on twentieth-century nationalism, and the fragmented logics of memes and conspiracy culture. As a Low Tide contribution, Tarar also presents Spiral Keti, a visual research interface that maps a Wikipedia rabbit hole as an experiment in defamiliarising the web.

Hiba Ali ’s lecture-performance Sounding the Ocean: Spiral Networks of Remembrance and Elation introduces an exploratory, research-based video game environment that brings together music, architecture, and speculative worldbuilding across the Swahili Seas, connecting East Africa, the Gulf, and South Asia. Through gameplay excerpts, sound, and visual material, Ali situates worldbuilding as a method for sensing historical memory, oceanic exchange, and alternative technological imaginaries.