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
  4. 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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8. Sixteenth Century Technology




Details from:Sixteenth Century Technology: Analysis of My Tongue

            Sixteenth Century Technology: Analysis of My Tongue
            Aso Oke Fabric. Hand and machine woven in Ibadan, Nigeria. 
            Embroidery of a digital output from a GPT-3-based textual 
             analysis of the prose ‘Red Earth’ written by the artist. 
            100cm x 100cm
            Edition 1 of 1. 
            2021

As with most of the pieces in this project, the focus isn't so much on embedding seductive aura in the works themselves, rather indulging a theoretical space  in which the works are like outputs, nodes forming a collective thought. Therefore, in some way, there is active work against the vernacular of material and seduction, responding to the same in our technocratic processes, where there’s a reduction in the status of aesthetic aura, and process and delivery of optimal solutions for a narrow pool of end users rules supreme.

This piece is a direct contemplation of these ideas. A textual analysis algorithm is applied to a paragraph of prose from the book Red Earth. This analysis outputs a pattern recognition looking at associations between the words from the book, offering an alternative computational narrative. This methodology echoes weaving technologies (technological exchange) and a  textile designer from Ibadan Nigeria, weaved this output onto Aso Oke, a stiff Yoruba fabric used mostly at special events, and usually a lot more expressive in its design and embroidery. This method of weaving originated somewhere around the 16th century, a  process started by hand, but now also done with machine. 

The deep shimmering void here, a vast universe of silence around these words.