The Red Earth Project (2019-)

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

The Books
  1. About Red Earth
  2. Red Earth in the Paris Review
  3. Themes
  4. Form
  5. Where to buy
  6. What Lies Beyond the Red Earth? (2024)

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
  4. Earthsuits. Language: violence and repair.

Related Works
  1. Planetary Portals
  2. D.A.O.C., a film
  3. ‘I am in your dreams, but you are not in mine’  2025
  4. Losing is Ours
  5. Cybernetics, or Ghosts? An anthology
  6. Domicile 4

Next Steps
  1. Beyond the “Black” Corpus

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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Film: Diabolical Architectures of Colonialism (2023)


      
“I’d be made of gold,
you may be silver or platinum. 

If we’re lucky, then composite dreams; 
you made of palladium and nickel, 

me finding solace in tantalum, 
cobalt, and copper.”

Diabolical Architectures of Colonialism (2023), a research-based film, is a durational, allegorical response to the voices absent from data analysed in the Cecil Rhodes archive (held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford) from times during the Kimberley diamond rush (1871), South African gold rushes (1873-1886), and African expansion as a result of British, German, and Portuguese imperialism.

A speculative invocation of awkward spectres encapsulating both the injured body and the haunted injurious body of colonial legacy renders the negative spaces of extraction. speaking to colonialism’s temporal and psychological relentlessness, this film peeks at the haunted underside of perfect digital utopias, as the capture of resources still shapes today’s global economic disparities and interplanetary colonisation fantasies. Accompanied by a slowly building score evoking material earth, an unknown narrator offers several poems about these absences.

Created almost entirely in Unity 3D, the game engine software, this film ignores the three-act hero structure and requests the viewer to stay with its temporal conceit, as it engages the legacies of time, labour, psychological, material, and climate decimation in colonialism’s afterlives, examining how one’s cultural history and current reality are embedded and continued within these evasive bureaucratic languages, ledgers, and legacies.

Runtime 42.00.

A film by Michael Salu
Sound design by Kyprian Rainey.

For more information, please visit the film's website.