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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6. Direct Translation Diptych 1, 2, 3 & 4







            Direct Translation Diptych 1,2,3 & 4
            Diptych. Mixed Media: antique paper and ink. Text to image data translation from deep learning model. 
            Virtually hand-modelled sculpture from data output. 
            80cm x 40cm 
            2021

Once I began to form these sculptures, I was drawn to presenting the input and the manually sculpted outputs side by side in a series of diptychs, a classic arrangement in the history of Western art. 

The synthesis of translation laid stark, manual and computational.

I manually stamped fragments of the prose into the paper, evoking early printing as it was exported in exchange for land, thinking about the quantification of labour. 

This leads to the second part of each Diptych, using data as a resource. 

Some were in frames, and some had frames built into the image, looking at the tension between 'real' and 'unreal'. It's an interesting dichotomy to explore.