The Red Earth Project (2019-)
2. Research
The Red Earth Project has two points of origin: 1. Dante’s allegory of falling autumn leaves; his insistence that each damned soul is individual helps to think about synthesising data of the living and dead. 2. Difficulty with arguments in Chinua Achebe’s 1977 essay, An Image of Africa, where Achebe neglects to critique the power structure holding up the very ‘morality’ he appeals to while denouncing the racism of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
These points form the basis for an exploration of the connection between the foundation of modern statistical studies (which inform AI development today), their monotheistic origins, and how these religious origins relate to Christian missionaries, and the use of Christianity as an essential colonial strategy, for natural resource extraction from the continent of Africa.
Today, we can chart the relationship between the extraction of resources for energy consumption and the development of technological hardware powering computational evolution and a central idea of morality-as-strategy enacted by the tech world.
In the Red Earth Project, prose, photography, installation, and virtual architectures intersect to delve into this research, and interrogate the disregard of knowledge systems and cultures by the education and business sectors utilising probabilistic computation, informing today’s AI aspirations.