Description
A special short series of prints from the original work. Comes with a white border.
Ever Abeokuta
Mixed media: Photography. Text to image data translation
from deep learning model. Virtually hand-modelled sculpture
from data output. Digital collage.
53 x 83cm
Editions of 3
2021
Red Earth is an ongoing artistic, interdisciplinary study by Michael Salu, which is 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 AI innovation.
Transhumanist ideologies of a singular ontological history imply a determined ‘post-human’ future. Colonial legacy is bound up in the etymology of programming languages and statistical and probabilistic methodologies facilitating this development. With a universal ‘morality’ built from this ontological history, there is no room for indigenous cosmologies in a virtual “post-humanity” built from selective data, while extraction of natural resources from the African continent, from rare metals to human data and cheap labour, powers the future of increasingly energy-intensive computer hardware.
This evolving art project, takes inspiration from non-linear time within the Yoruba tradition, resisting defined edges, beginnings or endings and renders the link between the monotheistic intentions behind early statistical methods, which inform today’s AI aspirations, and the use of Christian morality as a method of colonisation across Africa for resource access. Red Earth asks how can other knowledge systems be visible within virtual architectures powered by AI innovation.
Red Earth, a primarily theoretical study, appropriates machine learning methodologies to synthesise relational objects that could indicate potential new pathways between divergent cosmologies, with the focus of this particular study on the origins of West African language and thought.
More at: https://theredearthproject.org/