The Red Earth Project (2019-)

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)

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. ‘I am in your dreams, but you are not in mine’ 7 Mar-15 Jun 2025
  3. Losing is Ours
  4. Cybernetics, or Ghosts? An anthology
  5. Domicile 4

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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‘I am in your dreams, but you are not in mine’



Fri 07 Mar 2025 - Sun 15 Jun 2025
Hallucinations of empire and the AI archive
I am in your dreams, but you are not in mine is a new exhibition and commission by the collective Planetary Portals at The Photographers’ Gallery from 7 March 2025. Interrogating archival photography and artificial intelligence (AI), the exhibition weaves together the environmental landscapes of 19th-century mining of gold and diamonds in South Africa with the scripting process of AI.

The exhibition asks how have diverse languages become compressed into one singular coding language and questions whose voices are not allowed to speak through the colonial archive. Whose voices are silenced, whose lives erased, and what materials cannot be archived?

Central to the exhibition is a series of single-shot films that use a variety of generative AI and digital processes, crafted from archival photographs sourced from the Papers of Cecil Rhodes at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Photography was an essential technology of imperial communication and a space of trespass and refusal, where subjects challenged the present and intent of colonial place-making.

The photographs in the exhibition provide a visual vocabulary of the “environment” of Rhodes and his legacy – from his origins in Hackney, East London to the diamond fields of South Africa – and provide a “portal” for critically engaging with the extractive logics of AI. The resulting works offer new narratives by exposing the gaps in large language models (LLMs) and the structural racial logics of universal norms.

This project is also available online on Unthinking Photography. It features extended studies based on four archival photographs from the Cecil Rhodes Papers at the Bodleian Library and uses parallax scrolling to navigate through the timelines of each study. Throughout, you'll notice internal links marked by red dots, which draw thematic connections between different areas of the work.

Visit The Photographers’ Gallery for more information.