The Red Earth Project (2019-)


Introduction
  1. Overview    
  2. Research
  3. A Lecture at Princeton

The Book
  1. About
  2. Red Earth in the Paris Review
  3. Themes
  4. Form
  5. Where to buy

Process and Output
  1. Conceptual Development
  2. Photography
  3. Prose
  4. Computational and Subjective Translation
  5. Digital to Physical
  6. Process 1: Process and Theory
  7. Process 2: Making
  8. Compositions

Selected Works
  1. Red Earth, The Book
  2. Ever Abeokuta
  3. Colonial Enterprise
  4. Red Earth
  5. Amor Fati
  6. Direct Translation Diptychs 1, 2, 3 & 4
  7. Sixteenth Century Technology
  8. How Can Time Become a Circle
  9. Deference
  10. Solitary Breath

Exhibitions & Performances
  1. Studio Hanniball
  2. Archive of Forgetfulness
  3. Listening to the Red Earth, a film

Community
The Red Earth Playlist

Shop

Related Works
  1. Planetary Portals

Next Steps

Object Int’l —
Info
  1. The Red Earth Project is an ongoing artistic, interdisciplinary study centred on prose reflections and machine translation, drawing attention to the precarious status of non-western cultural heritage, knowledge systems and practices in the increasingly dominant Western systems of data, virtual architectures and AI technologies. This research asks how alternative cosmologies can be better represented within virtual architectures powered by probabalistic computation. 

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4. Computational and Subjective Translation




Diagram of the Red Earth process.
2021


This is a project of translation, linguistic, visual and computational, with thoughts moving back and forth between forms as a series of looped chains of ideas. Photography including photography, video, prose, machine learning, and 3D sculpture, visualise different continuities of language and interpretations of concepts like time, in the culture of the artist’s origin: Yoruba (Nigeria)—to address this exploitative exchange in the computational and the geological, attempting to propose, through anomaly, an equitable evolution and preservation of cultural heritage in a future consolidating virtual environments and AI. 

The processes integral to this research bring subjective and computational translation together. 

  • Subjective: translation between forms of record (writing, photography and video).
  • Computational: machine learning translation models to 3D mesh data, to manual virtual sculpture.