The Red Earth Project (2019-)

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

The Books
  1. About
  2. Red Earth in the Paris Review
  3. Themes
  4. Form
  5. Where to buy
  6. What Lies Beyond the Red Earth?

Sales

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
   1. The Red Earth Playlist
   2. Beyond the Zero Podcast
   3. EDIT Magazin

Related Works
  1. Planetary Portals
  2. Losing is Ours
  3. Cybernetics, or Ghosts? An anthology

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. A critical study of machine learning (AI), this research asks how alternative cosmologies can be better represented within virtual architectures powered by probabalistic computation. 

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1. Conceptual Development




A chart of the conceptual development process 


The name of the project, Red Earth comes from the prominence of Red Clay Earth forming much of the land of West Africa. The colour largely comes from the earth being enriched by iron and aluminium, through heavy rainfall during the rainy season. In order for this land to be usable as soil, and nutritious enough to grow crops, it has to be put through a series of processes, a practice that goes back a long way but is increasingly modernised. The

The metaphor of converting the red clay of West Africa into nutritious soil shapes the different processes and methods of translation in this project. 

As is often witnessed noticeably in flora, displacement and relocation can affect the well-being of biological entities. Red Earth explores the metaphysical dissonance that occurs from living in non-linear virtual space and time across hemispheres, by distilling, partly through code, what occurs when translating thought between language forms.

These distillations take the form of geological totems, data topography as manifestations of the missing earth as it were. 

These processes of translation attempt to engage with the metaphysical discord within re-routed and excavated cultural identity and led by Yoruba continuity of spirit (beyond the body), this work aims at continuous translation between forms: image, prose, code a three-act structure; moving back and forth between modes of life, physical and virtual, of the body and after the body, as a way of taking ownership of computational translation processes, which are inherently exclusive.