Michael Salu, Red Earth. Calamari Archive, 2023
https://theredearthproject.org/
https://michaelsalu.com/
Conversing with Dante, Yoruba metaphysics and probabilistic
computation, Red Earth is an expansive text and the source material
for Michael Salu’s broader interdisciplinary artistic study, where
machine learning is central to various processes to ask whether
computational translation can be used to engage alternative
cosmologies.
As a rhythmic, ever-shifting experience where the protagonist
questions notions of selfhood and where grief and loss mesh with
candor towards nonhuman perspectives, different cultural
interpretations of time and morality enable exploration of a
diasporic vestibule between cosmologies of thought, cultures and
languages. Red Earth invites readers to see beyond an increasingly
statistical societal gaze and instead meditate on life and death and
what the virtual realm means for memory, particularly memories
unacknowledged by the dichotomous ‘universal’ language of code.
"The emergency we've made for ourselves as a species begs for
books like Michael Salu's haunting and beautiful Red Earth. At once
vast and intimate, galactic and rooted in the earth, this book reads
like a genre unto itself. Here are the sonics of poetry and the
choral qualities of theatre. Voices swirl and speak, then are lost to
the wind. Memories appear and dissolve before nostalgia can snatch
them into tidy orbits. To enter this book is to enter a cosmic
reckoning with finitude, a record, a warning, and a psalm of our
time." —John Freeman, author of Wind, Trees
"In Michael Salu’s Red Earth, writing becomes a virtuosic act
of listening. Salu listens to history’s castoffs—slaves thrown
overboard, soil used up and abandoned—so that the relationship
between historical hierarchies of power and contemporary crises of
ecology gently becomes obvious as if of its own accord. This amidst
the strange and irresistible ether of Salu’s polychronic forms and
tones, as echoes of the Divine Comedy leak into the Orphic narrator’s
radio talk show. As in the classic novels of Daniela Hodrová and
Ahmet Altan, Salu’s floating polyrhythms seem almost to weave
themselves, crossing historical eras, terrestrial deserts, ocean
depths, and metaphysical thresholds—a polyphony of voices from all
the dimensions of the world."—Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of
The Box
"Red Earth is a radio show on low frequency. Like a ghost walk
at the crack of dawn it writes a different grounding and earth into
being. Attuned to the quiet frequencies of colonial afterlives, our
guides Manto and the narrator, descend into Hades like Orpheus,
taking their listeners on a journey to hear the voices unheard in the
earth—bony voices in the half light, raw with grief and petrified
accounts of deep earth wounds. The methodological brief is to listen
intently and hear in the earth different stories. In Red Earth,
Michael Salu brings a warm and uncompromising look at pain,
Christianity, the arts economy of ‘black as bling’, AI, virtual
worldings, hardened realities and all the psychic contradictions of
late-night colonial earth. Rather than the didactic pronouncements of
terrible violence and its on-going presence, the writing bids us to
come with, in an elegiac remonstration of the intimacies of
encounters…Red Earth is a literary journey fellow with Aimé
Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to my Native Land and Franz Fanon’s
Black Skins, White Masks, and Salu’s autoethnography is equally as
impressive and unique in the tremor of its language and urgency of
its questions. Stay tuned, a major talent has just launched a show
that everyone should listen to."—Kathryn Yusoff, Author of A
Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
"In Michael Salu’s Red Earth, writing becomes a virtuosic act
of listening. Salu listens to history’s castoffs—slaves thrown
overboard, soil used up and abandoned—so that the relationship
between historical hierarchies of power and contemporary crises of
ecology gently becomes obvious as if of its own accord. This amidst
the strange and irresistible ether of Salu’s polychronic forms and
tones, as echoes of the Divine Comedy leak into the Orphic narrator’s
radio talk show. As in the classic novels of Daniela Hodrová and
Ahmet Altan, Salu’s floating polyrhythms seem almost to weave
themselves, crossing historical eras, terrestrial deserts, ocean
depths, and metaphysical thresholds—a polyphony of voices from all
the dimensions of the world."—Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of
The Box
"The emergency we've made for ourselves as a species begs for
books like Michael Salu's haunting and beautiful Red Earth. At once
vast and intimate, galactic and rooted in the earth, this book reads
like a genre unto itself. Here are the sonics of poetry and the
choral qualities of theatre. Voices swirl and speak, then are lost to
the wind. Memories appear and dissolve before nostalgia can snatch
them into tidy orbits. To enter this book is to enter a cosmic
reckoning with finitude, a record, a warning, and a psalm of our
time."—John Freeman, author of Wind, Trees
"Red Earth is a radio show on low frequency. Like a ghost walk
at the crack of dawn it writes a different grounding and earth into
being. Attuned to the quiet frequencies of colonial afterlives, our
guides Manto and the narrator, descend into Hades like Orpheus,
taking their listeners on a journey to hear the voices unheard in the
earth—bony voices in the half light, raw with grief and petrified
accounts of deep earth wounds. The methodological brief is to listen
intently and hear in the earth different stories. In Red Earth,
Michael Salu brings a warm and uncompromising look at pain,
Christianity, the arts economy of ‘black as bling’, AI, virtual
worldings, hardened realities and all the psychic contradictions of
late-night colonial earth. Rather than the didactic pronouncements of
terrible violence and its on-going presence, the writing bids us to
come with, in an elegiac remonstration of the intimacies of
encounters…Red Earth is a literary journey fellow with Aimé
Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to my Native Land and Franz Fanon’s
Black Skins, White Masks, and Salu’s autoethnography is equally as
impressive and unique in the tremor of its language and urgency of
its questions. Stay tuned, a major talent has just launched a show
that everyone should listen to."—Kathryn Yusoff, Author of A
Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
Where do the
resources sustaining and developing AI and virtual futures come from?
Which cultures
and languages will be preserved in a virtual afterlife?
Who gets to live
forever?
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.
Red Earth is art led by original narrative prose written by the
artist, which will be published as a book in October by Calamari
Press NYC. This prose delves into different cultural understandings
of time and morality, to help understand the relationship between
natural resources and virtual time. This project employs machine
learning methodologies to synthesise relational objects to imply new
pathways between divergent cosmologies, currently focusing on the
origins of West African language and thought.
Exploring Western morality in an original work of prose written by
Michael Salu, language translation models are used to translate the
work into a data topography. Inspired by Yoruba oratorical thought
and manifestations of language within physical objects, this data is
then used as raw material to sculpt a series of virtual totems,
sculptures for a codex imbued with aggregated thought, distilling the
exchange between text and data, colonial and inherent language.
Machine translation combines with intuitive, cognitive translations
of ideas between artistic forms to explore whether syntheses of
memory, beyond object and material, can suggest ways we might develop
alternative cultural heritages or whether computational methodologies
based on statistical analyses can ever be in dialogue with other
metaphysical origins and ‘uncertainties’.
Machine learning is used to translate the prose into data
topographies. Inspired by Yoruba oratorical thought and
manifestations of language within physical objects, this data is used
as raw material to sculpt a series of totems, for a codex imbued with
aggregated thought, distilling the exchange between text and data,
colonial and inherent language, physical and digital worlds.
Rather than definitive artworks, Red Earth is process-based, creating
a series of ‘translations,’ both computational and poetic,
between art forms and languages, intermittmenttly providing a series
of outputs, as interconnected works combine photography, prose,
sculpture, installation, video and machine learning models. Red Earth
aims to draw attention to intricate cross-cultural realities and
creative practices neglected by technological advancement from a
singular knowledge system.
Computer translation combines with intuitive, cognitive translation
of ideas between artistic forms to explore whether syntheses of
memory, beyond object and material, can suggest ways we might
progress alternative cultural heritages, or whether computational
methodologies based on statistical analyses can ever be in dialogue
with other metaphysical origins and ‘uncertainties’. Blurring
distinction between physical and digital—increasingly demanding,
and straddling spatiality across physical and digital divides.
Red Earth suggests the beginnings of alternative virtual archives of
culture for the emerging digital future of Africa.
The African continent has a young, tech-literate population for which
Google is building a subsea data cabling route from Portugal to South
Africa. In Red Earth, converting the red clay of West Africa into
soil nutritious enough to nurture and grow life serves as a metaphor
for shaping the process-based, linguistic, visual and computational
‘translations’ used to reflect on Africa’s digital future.
The project interrogates how colonial legacies and practices are
bound up in the knowledge architecture of programming languages.
Equally, 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.
With a focus on the new scramble for Africa, key to current
geo-political wrangling over the economic world order, this project
focuses on cultural visibility of a sizeable percentage of the Global
Ethnic Majority.
This project aims at increasing awareness of the disparities nd power
dynamics implicit within the technologies integral to living, working
and learning today. Red Earth aims to contribute to a crucial
dialogue between the computer sciences and the humanities, as we try
to understand how to live in a socially and environmentally changing
world, with growing disparities.
What Lies Beyond
the Red Earth?
By Michael Salu October 17, 2023
A few years ago, I read a lecture by Chinua Achebe given in 1975,
later published as an essay entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” While I greatly respect Achebe’s
novels, his essays have often left me wanting. His voice reminded me
of my grandfather’s, the intonations of a proud Nigerian man,
rightly aggrieved at the dysfunctional state of his country, his
continent, and its indefatigable life in the face of rampant,
extractive exploitation by imperial powers. I feel that Achebe’s
frustration can leave blind spots in his arguments, and the lecture
in question—an outright denouncement of Conrad’s famed novel and
its canonized status as “permanent literature”—was, I thought,
an example of this. Achebe considered Conrad’s novel explicitly
racist in its themes, in its depictions of the “natives,” and in
the gaze of Marlow, Conrad’s primary protagonist, who Achebe
believed wasn’t much removed from Conrad’s disposition.
Achebe questions the meaning of writing to our society, or the
meaning of any art for that matter, when it can be so explicitly
racist and go mostly unremarked upon by fans and critics alike,
regardless of how beautiful the turns of phrase or evocative the
depictions of the lush, sweltering alien landscape. I have a complex
relationship with Conrad’s novel and agree with some of what Achebe
put forth, but his argument felt incomplete. Achebe’s disgust is
understandable, but I think one can see Conrad was also getting at a
lack of vocabulary for this rich, intricate world, of atmospheres and
new sensory and metaphysical experiences, at times in his prose
defaulting to beautifully phrased but reductive tropes, which are
still embedded in the unconscious of Western society today. As Achebe
railed at Conrad’s reduction of complex cultures, knowledge
systems, and languages, down to a dark, flat backdrop for Marlow’s
descent into the pit of despair, and lamented Conrad’s
objectification of West African bodies, I became hooked on an
important and maybe even existential question—who was Achebe’s
lamentation aimed at? Who was the primary audience for his words,
written in English? And was there a moral authority to hear his
appeal, and if so, what then?
I envision this moral authority: a shining round table, a collective
ethereal body. I can picture where this body receives education, and
what information and legacy bestow upon this body to uphold such
cosmic authority. I peer at this body’s ancestral responsibility
and how intricately woven its cultural history is with morality,
technology, and progress—through religion, reason, language, war,
and subsequent laws. I wonder, wouldn’t this same moral authority
Achebe speaks to be the same that has canonized Conrad’s novel,
lauding it as one Western literature’s great works?
Roughly around the time of Conrad’s birth, Anglican and Baptist
missionaries from Britain began spreading the Christian word across
Nigeria alongside armed colonial powers, and systemically implemented
a proposed order and moral structure, offering bondage under the
benevolent cloak of Christianity. They found innovative ways to
suppress and diminish ancient local knowledge systems whilst
leveraging the locals’ deeply inherent spiritual devotion. Tribal
factions with differing religious and philosophical dispositions were
difficult to control without the concerted imposition of particular
moral principles through Christianity. Coordinating labor and
governing over resource-rich lands was made easier by exploiting the
tenets of local knowledge and sowing discord between tribes.
Christianity has been significant to psychological governance, by
imposing a moral condition and constraining culture, dissenting
thought, or ways of seeing and being alien to the new “explorers”
of this productive continent of vast cultural and environmental
diversity.
Christianity existed in Africa before the arrival of missionaries.
However, their spectral presence served a particular economic
purpose, the legacy of which I witness today on the continent and
across its diaspora. We can see this coercion and its resulting
conservative legacy of docile communities as part of a colonial
extraction strategy.
Many early contributions to foundational mathematics originated in
Asia and Africa, and roughly a century before these missionary
expeditions, the origins of European statistical mathematics and
probabilistic methodologies were forming. These methods are now
pivotal to computational methods like machine learning , vital to the
pursuit of AI. Bayes’ Theorem, for example, a formula founded by
the reverend and early statistician Thomas Bayes, is a significant
driver of machine learning and originates in what appears to be
shaky, metaphysical, and even monotheistic beginnings, as Justin
Joque explains in his book Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial
Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism.
Bayes’ Theorem is a mathematical formula for determining
conditional probability: the likelihood of an outcome occurring based
on a previous outcome having occurred in similar circumstances. One
might establish a belief, and later update said belief with newly
acquired information supporting one’s argument or intention.
Bayesian influence is significant to quantum mechanics (which is key
to AI research and development) and its attempts to understand the
physics of nature and the uncertainty of the universe.
As Joque says, the metaphysical origins of Western statistics have
been well-documented by mathematicians and historians alike, many of
whom have strongly resisted the Bayesian method, particularly in the
twentieth century. Still, intriguingly, this method has recently
resurged and is now very popular in algorithmic computing, developing
“truths” (the outcome of this subjective method), principally for
capital from numerous subjective origins (including social origins)
that, over time, we have established for primarily economic purposes.
This subjective Bayesian method—beginning with a guess or an
assumption and adding data to solidify one’s guess or
assumption—inevitably puts us in a slippery metaphysical dimension,
not too dissimilar to where we might have been in years gone by,
particularly in Europe, where society leaned on monotheistic
reasoning to make sense of the world. Therefore, one might speculate
that the logical endpoint of computation based on this statistical
model, implemented by engineers and venture capitalists educated
under a singular ontological framework, might aim at a convergent
“truth,” whatever that may be, if we understand the (even
unconscious) influence of monotheism on these protagonists
implementing their dominant beliefs and morality, through the
accumulation of vast amounts of information, with origins already
hazy.
So then, a moral authority? If we use—and I consider this pronoun
necessary here, for several reasons, as our involvement purports to
be passive, but is not—algorithmic models to determine who has
access to a loan or whether someone is guilty of a crime or not (to
be then placed in for-profit prison systems), does morality, or a
moral authority, as we understand it, ultimately serve only the
acquisition, maintenance, and accumulation of capital? If so, then to
who is the moral vanguard Achebe appeals to?
Achebe’s appeal, deep into the latter half of the twentieth
century, is to an English-speaking, educated authority, of a dominant
economic and educational system, with culture prominently in its
service. Hundreds of years of Christian influence and legacy
intersect with the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and
individualism, which allies with violent methods of implementing
extraction in distant lands in ways increasingly invisible to us as
technology surges, all which combine to form today’s Western world,
where race, class, and gender make for active feedback loops to
further accumulate capital by manipulating datasets, which entrench
and dictate our respective fates within this socially constructed
economic system.
The same system of imbalances and inbuilt gaslighting narratives
provide much of the patronage of art and culture. Patronage that
attempts to uphold a moral center, guiding us to how we might exist
alongside each other. “Culture” defines society’s artistic and
intellectual refinements. We needn’t disregard the etymological
origins of the word in this instance: of cultivating and tilling
earth until it is fruitful and beneficial enough to sustain life. Or
the biological meaning: an environment suitable for the growth of
bacteria to spread indiscriminately. Culture maintains primacy for
this economic system, affirming a dominant language and knowledge and
suppressing other influences and dissent. Culture’s power and
intentions are even crystalline in how few works of literature from
across the world are translated into English until they’re deemed
worthy of translation by an authority, the same authority,
ultimately, that canonizes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I remain,
for example, astounded by how many contemporary novels from the
United States I read with a complete lack of a “nonwhite” person
written into their pages as if none exist. An observation I make with
some understanding of the history of segregation, yet, even so, when
I imagine the scale of such autonomous formulations within society,
it is enough to take one’s breath.
Transhumanism, a new ideological formation that appears to be just a
loose cluster of ideas, aims at an optimized human condition, which
transhumanists might argue can only occur in a state beyond the
fallibility of the corpus, where we find empowerment in new deified
technologies, which construct a mirror of increasing sophistication.
As Narcissus gazes down at his rippling reflection, it begs the
question of who stands visible in the mirror. Transhumanism, the
technological ascension of the human condition, an ideological
aspiration, appears incapable of imagining ascendancy without the
ballast of wealth enabling further advancement, inevitably in the
hands of a few then tasked with designing the human through a lens
that cannot be anything but eugenic by its very foundations. Peer
from their vantage point to a tier just below, where our modern
saints, namely celebrities, serve as prototypes through feedback
loops of continuous visibility and modification, guiding the
surface-level aesthetic ideal of the human.
The fervor for AI’s ascension to a plane beyond us is a
quasi-spiritual desire, echoing the past’s metaphysical anxieties
and our need to see something, possibly something monotheistic,
beyond ourselves. It seems now, through probabilistic methods, the
hallowed saint forms in our image as we shape greater systems of
knowledge to further a delusion, synthesizing the spectacle of an
impressionistic, all-seeing and all-doing deity and, yes, a moral
authority to whom we’ll perform worship through mimetic ritual.
This supposed moral authority remains a primary weapon for today’s
technological and economic shackling of and extraction from the human
condition. Social media companies, for example, from the same moral
lineage discussed here, provide us with ways to see more of the world
than ever before but attempt to control what aspects of humanity we
should see, how we see them, and to which we should aspire. Utilizing
long-established economic imbalances, these companies maintain what
we might call cognitive call centers, across Africa and Asia, paying
employees a pittance to screen harmful content before it reaches us,
the comparably wealthy consumers, and making it clear, if ever we
choose to avert our gaze from the gleaming totem, whose welfare is
regarded as valuable and profitable. It has been widely reported that
social media has worsened our collective mental and emotional welfare
as a society, so the comparably wealthy consumers, also find
themselves an extractive resource. Then there is our evolving echo,
language learning models, and the moral limitations they apply to
what we may ask of them. We remain docile to technology, and lack the
vocabulary to really speak about it, as Heidegger once noted,
therefore we do not or cannot resist.
So I wonder what these universal claims to a moral authority are. How
do we determine objective truths about humanity that we lean on to
maintain and evolve society—truths that glean and reconstitute
subjectivity, that increasingly inform and guide our day-to-day—when
these truths are developed, in part, through aggregating and
reconstituting data, deploying subjective methodologies, which
neglect the thought, methods, and experiences of large swathes of the
human and nonhuman world, whilst simultaneously finding those realms
materially valuable.
I am not saying anything new, but the conditions of diaspora,
existing in the vestibule as it were, offer unique perspective and
experience, enabling one to see what remains outside “progress,”
leaving one room to ruminate on what idealized progress can only
mean. Look at the uncanny horror of a slick image export from a
language learning model, and see our collective pursuit of an ideal
self-representation. This representation of the human, with lines and
scars smoothened, feelings transcended, through our loop of dreams
and desires, told and untold, live and evolve in billions of
datasets, some of which (like porn) tell more truth about what we
covet (or think we covet).
The vast processing power and conducting qualities of rare metals
required for increasingly energy-intensive computers, from GPUs for
gaming and 3D rendering, to the violently wasteful, yet invisible,
energy-sapping crypto-mining, ignorantly shilled by celebrities,
become a painful metaphor for our wasteful annihilation of the
planet. These resources include human data and labor, and despite
many obstacles, the African continent gains increasing attention from
swarming venture capitalists for its young, growing middle-class,
tech-literate population and technological innovations.
Diverse languages, as with diverse tribes, existed beyond and across
the dividing lines of nationhood engraved throughout the continent by
colonialism, but language control has since been one of the most
effective ways to control land for access to resources. One can hear
lamentations at the reluctance of African teachers to teach in native
languages and who even reprimand students for speaking them. When we
comprehend what else language suppresses, such as cultures, knowledge
systems, and distinct moral principles, which may differ from the
standard fed to us, we might think differently about the accelerated
consolidation of languages, meanings, and intentions, output by our
digital deities, a homogenization echoed by reduced agricultural
biodiversity.
As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o says, to be divorced from one’s mother
tongue is a form of slavery, and language is more than a simple
ordering and patterning of words or signs, but it runs deeper,
through the body, through the soil and a continuous lineage of
ancestry in dialogue with the earth. Many former colonized countries
grapple with the in-between—the metaphysical struggle between
imposed and inherent cultures and the disingenuous contradictions of
a top-down moral design. How do we consider how “native” English
speakers of formerly colonized countries use the language differently
from what we might consider the standard?
So we reach the bubbling core of my book Red Earth and the
interdisciplinary art project it is central to, which is no
lament—quite the contrary, it is a meditation from a particular
vantage point, even if I am partly divorced from my mother tongue. I
am a fluent “Listener,” but I cannot confidently be a
“Caller”—which, for me, is a strange vestibuled condition, an
incomplete relationship to a native cosmology, swirling only at its
fringes, one’s body feeling and intuiting, but rarely articulating
this innate knowledge, even though I hear it, and feel it, like the
red earth between my toes, and in how the sounds of palm leaves
rustlings say so much more. I ask what this kind of in-between means
for a world of precise statistical perspectives and binary ordering.
I can see and feel what posthumanity has existed in this culture and
what lies beyond the soul-sapping postcolonial discourses, where many
wail and others nod along as if listening, but not really. What lies
beyond? With my feet firmly planted on the ground, I try to touch
this possibility, however faintly.
I grab this vestibule, an open secret, as a unique place of my own.
Born to Nigerian parents and raised in the United Kingdom, I submit
to the perpetual translation of my identity—a constant feedback
loop, charging back and forth from one cosmos to the other. Growing
up, this became a distinct private space removed from many other
people in my immediate environment. Rather like the way I have
existed between cultures, languages, and knowledge systems, I have
wondered if there is any possibility of creating a dialogue between
probabilistic computation based on the origins mentioned earlier and
the metaphysical foundations of alternative origins, such as Yoruba
culture. Or is the idea entirely paradoxical and pointless? The
diasporic existence, a meshing of worlds across time and space,
traversing coordinates, existing in motion, non-place, and
uncertainty (a realm also concerning quantum mechanics), is an
interesting point at which to consider where and how knowledge
systems and language might meet, or to consider at least any
impressionistic or metaphysical entanglement with these knowledge
systems—mathematics in dialogue with ritual and tradition.
Famed Nobel laureate playwright and novelist Wole Soyinka addresses
such parallels in his book Myth, Literature and the African World,
when he posits the many similarities one could draw between Yoruba
deities and the “universal relevance” of Greek gods significant
to the origins of Western thought. One of the temporal concepts
Soyinka addresses is the nonlinear conception of time beyond the
human, a key concept in Yoruba thought and philosophy and a key
driver to my Red Earth project. Soyinka suggests Yoruba is comparable
with Greek mythology, or Judeo-Christian theology, in richness and
depth, and how, for Yoruba, the degree of acceptance of something
like nonchronological time is implicit, innate, and given reverence
and understanding. Within such thought, one can also find moral
dispositions, actions, and practice differing from those in the
Judeo-Christian or Greek mythological definition of the term, where,
for instance, the Greek gods, as Soyinka explains, are beholden to
little or no consequence for their depravity. The only time they may
bear consequence is when they infringe upon another deity, unlike the
Yoruba deities, who commit transgressions, but must somehow
acknowledge their actions. Soyinka suggests the existence of an
alternative morality to the European, which may, to a large extent,
be unconscious in Yoruba society. Yet, when I consider my diasporic
vestibule, I consider these unconscious realms and how these
subtleties, which are part of me, and others in our behavior and
language, disappear in universalizing computational concepts.
I want to draw attention to the need for new archives of the future
and new ways to think about a computational existence. The Red Earth
Project is a speculative exercise about language, translation and
data, and whose language, history, authority, and morality are now
encoded into our digital realities. I am asking if our current
trajectory will only entrench the negation covered here in feedback
loops much faster and more granular than we can comprehend, and
whether there is any room at all for provenance with this data or is
it inherently flawed. Is computation, by its foundational principles,
anathema to other metaphysical dimensions than the one from whence it
came? Is this simply the underwhelming and even violent trajectory
for the autonomy of alternate cultures, moral ideas, and outlooks as
their lands of origin shudder and succumb to climate damage? As words
drive my creative practice, with this book I eke out a metaphysical
realm of my own, from which I can begin a process of experimentation
on what equitable exchange between culture and computation could
become, an interdisciplinary practice echoing my reality.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/10/17/what-lies-beyond-the-red-earth/
Excerpts, reviews + other links:
—Beyond the Zero
—Archive of Forgetfulness
—Berfrois
—Queen Mob's Teahouse
—Flat Journal
—Exhibition at Studio Hannibal, Berlin
Michael Salu is a British-born Nigerian writer, artist,
scholar, editor and creative strategist with a strongly
interdisciplinary practice. His written work has appeared in literary
journals, magazines, art and academic publications, and as an artist,
he has exhibited internationally. He runs House of Thought, an
artistic research practice and consultancy focusing on bridging
creative, critical thinking and technology and is part of Planetary
Portals, a research collective. Red Earth is his first book.
