A WRITER OF CRITICALLY SPECULATIVE
AND EXPLORATORY LITERATURE.
A WORLD-BUILDER AND THINKER.
AN INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR AND ARTIST WORKING WITH BOTH WORDS AND IMAGES.
For some years now I have conducted extensive creative and critical research on new technologies, and their impact on society. These works take the form of essays, fiction, exhibitions, film, literary editions, talks, academic collaborations and now, a book.
MY WORK
I am a writer, artist, critic, filmmaker and creative director, my work and ideas find a place in a multidisciplinary practice. My writing, art and talks have recently centred on where the evolving semantics of technology, language and geo-politics meet. My written work has appeared in many literary journals, magazines and art publications.
I have often given talks and contributed to the art and media curriculums of various universities including The Royal College of Art, Kingston University, Birmingham University and Norwich University. I have been an advisor to the AOI (Association of Illustrators), a mentor at The Photographers Gallery and have been a guest speaker and moderator at a variety of live events and symposiums across the arts including TEDx and 5x15.
I have picked up awards for my design and direction, and I am the founder of House of Thought, a research practice and creative consultancy, underscored by new technologies, literature, art and design.
Red Earth, the work of prose at the centre of my interdisciplinary project, will be published as a book by Calamari Archive in October.
Have a look at my recent guest edition on writing and technology for Writer's Mosaic. It'll give you an idea of some of what I am thinking about and how I apply my ideas across different disciplines and collaborations. The edition is inspired by Italo Calvino's 1967 essay, Cybernetics and Ghosts.
I have often given talks and contributed to the art and media curriculums of various universities including The Royal College of Art, Kingston University, Birmingham University and Norwich University. I have been an advisor to the AOI (Association of Illustrators), a mentor at The Photographers Gallery and have been a guest speaker and moderator at a variety of live events and symposiums across the arts including TEDx and 5x15.
I have picked up awards for my design and direction, and I am the founder of House of Thought, a research practice and creative consultancy, underscored by new technologies, literature, art and design.
Red Earth, the work of prose at the centre of my interdisciplinary project, will be published as a book by Calamari Archive in October.
Have a look at my recent guest edition on writing and technology for Writer's Mosaic. It'll give you an idea of some of what I am thinking about and how I apply my ideas across different disciplines and collaborations. The edition is inspired by Italo Calvino's 1967 essay, Cybernetics and Ghosts.
SELECTED FICTION & POETRY
A short text on fate, climate and late capitalism. Published by Sleepingfish from Calamari Archive
This guest edition, edited by me, is a thought experiment inspired by Italo Calvino's 1967 essay Cybernetics and Ghosts to reflect on the expansive role technology plays in our lives and literature today. Featuring short fiction from Iphgenia Baal, Tice Cin, Vanessa Onwuemezi and Sara Saab, and essays from cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane, writers Irenosen Okojie and myself. The edition also includes a snapshot of my ML and language project, Red Earth.
A short piece of speculative fiction about the future of haptic and perception-based technologies. The story appears in RETRO FUTURE a 2022 publication by NEXT NATURE
A selection from my inter-disciplinary project Red Earth, including a section from the book-length prose poem.
A selection from my inter-disciplinary project Red Earth, including a section from the book-length prose poem appears in issue 245 of Ambit Magazine .
A short story for the annually released magazine, Garagisme.
An unsettling ambience hovers over a couple's escape to the Lake District and over their choices and the decisions they feel they have made. A fast-moving frictionless power is dragging them forward into a self-made abyss involving a 'financial dominatrix' called Phantom Telos. Does the dominatrix exist or not? Maybe it doesn't matter.
An unsettling ambience hovers over a couple's escape to the Lake District and over their choices and the decisions they feel they have made. A fast-moving frictionless power is dragging them forward into a self-made abyss involving a 'financial dominatrix' called Phantom Telos. Does the dominatrix exist or not? Maybe it doesn't matter.
A short story in Wildness Journal, Aug 2021
A brief meditation on the virtual, on landscape, existential anxiety, and some of the psychological dissonances wrapped up in 'British Identity'
A brief meditation on the virtual, on landscape, existential anxiety, and some of the psychological dissonances wrapped up in 'British Identity'
Prose extract from my book-length work, a part of my research project Red Earth, conceptually exploring translation as a way of straddling divergent cosmologies in a virtual afterlife.
Included in The Archive of Forgetfulness, 2021. A project supported by the Goethe Institute.
Included in The Archive of Forgetfulness, 2021. A project supported by the Goethe Institute.
A short story about art, time and a fading love. Inspired by my intimate relationship with music.
Pubiished in La Piccioletta Barca. You can read it here
Pubiished in La Piccioletta Barca. You can read it here
Lolli Editions brings 18 international writers together in special book object designed by Studio Ard – Chuard & Nørregaard. A meteoric publishing project, the volume has been produced in response to Covid-19.
Tools for Extinction brings together 18 international writers in a collective response to the open-ended period of social distancing, closures, and illness caused by Covid-19. Compiled during the initial lockdown in Europe, this special collection is a meteoric publishing project with contributions from some of the most exciting and innovative authors working today.
Meditating on notions of distance and closeness, sameness and alterity, extinguishing and kindling, Tools for Extinction considers how a common pause might give rise to new modes of domesticity and shift experiences of time. What gestures and actions are we willing to perform to make ourselves, and each other, feel at ease – or at work? What tools and objects are useful, or unprecedentedly useless, to us in the process? And as our species' trademark proclivity for projecting ourselves into the future is disrupted, might we come to see the buildings, animals, plants and foodstuffs around us in a new light?
Compiled, edited and with a foreword by Denise Rose Hansen
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Tools for Extinction brings together 18 international writers in a collective response to the open-ended period of social distancing, closures, and illness caused by Covid-19. Compiled during the initial lockdown in Europe, this special collection is a meteoric publishing project with contributions from some of the most exciting and innovative authors working today.
Meditating on notions of distance and closeness, sameness and alterity, extinguishing and kindling, Tools for Extinction considers how a common pause might give rise to new modes of domesticity and shift experiences of time. What gestures and actions are we willing to perform to make ourselves, and each other, feel at ease – or at work? What tools and objects are useful, or unprecedentedly useless, to us in the process? And as our species' trademark proclivity for projecting ourselves into the future is disrupted, might we come to see the buildings, animals, plants and foodstuffs around us in a new light?
Compiled, edited and with a foreword by Denise Rose Hansen
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Design produces desires.
If an automated factory producing self-driving cars to automate the cognitive experience of driving, were to speak, what would it say and how might it sound? Say it needed a way to communicate its output, might it stoop as low to using language. Might it examine and quickly transcend our meagre musings on being, consciousness and even aura.
I mused on this for a piece of short fiction in the latest issue of Garagisme the contemporary automotive journal. The structure of the story ins inspired by the Python programming language. The theme of the issue: Design produces desires. Available to pre-order now.
If an automated factory producing self-driving cars to automate the cognitive experience of driving, were to speak, what would it say and how might it sound? Say it needed a way to communicate its output, might it stoop as low to using language. Might it examine and quickly transcend our meagre musings on being, consciousness and even aura.
I mused on this for a piece of short fiction in the latest issue of Garagisme the contemporary automotive journal. The structure of the story ins inspired by the Python programming language. The theme of the issue: Design produces desires. Available to pre-order now.
My story 'Black Hands' that appears in issue 2 of the brilliant new magazine Archivio, was shortlisted for 'Best Original Fiction' in the Stack Magazine awards, alongside work from notable literary magazines like SAND and Funhouse. The story came about as a response to some anonymous Desert Storm photographs from the collection of Brad Feuerhelm. My story is written through the voice of a gulf war vet, who, many years later reckons painfully with his resignation at the limitations of mankind and the eternal enterprise of ritual, sacrifice and scapegoat.
The Dark Preview is a new research collective set up by Casper Laing and Rut Blees Luxemburg. My contribution to Issue 1, is a somewhat elegiac poem to the ghosts of the city of London (see Grenfell, Homelessness, Windrush), to their erasure, to our impotence and to the relentlessness of technocratic deception.
Courtney fell in love at Disneyland. Fifty years later she returns to the site of this life changing encounter to take shelter from the disorder brought on by an increasingly unforgiving climate.
A short piece of prose inspired by The Hypocrites in Dante's Inferno. The piece appeared in a publication by The Photographer's Gallery and on Cabaret Wittgenstein.
Artwork by Michael Salu
Artwork by Michael Salu
My short story entitled The Nod appears in the inaugural issue of Freeman's Journal.
The Nod is a i guess a kafka-esque exploration of a digital world, in this case virtual reality, to dig a little into the nuances of the tropes of cultural and social identity constructs. Can virtual reality and digital experiences help us to understand each other?
The Nod is a i guess a kafka-esque exploration of a digital world, in this case virtual reality, to dig a little into the nuances of the tropes of cultural and social identity constructs. Can virtual reality and digital experiences help us to understand each other?
A short story, partly inspired by Kanye West and transgressing economic/racial realities. It explores a prototype software (still in BETA) that has been designed to further the advancement of the S.O.U.L. dream experience for a particular group of Users.
Her fingers play the keys of your spine and yours hers. They will move and explore, nimbly traversing each others contrasting landscapes. In the dark you will begin to feel more hands upon your body, hands that you are sure do not belong to her.
A story about Marilyn Monroe.
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A story about Marilyn Monroe.
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A story about the male gaze.
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Systemic Obfuscation of User Liberalism (or S.O.U.L. for short) is a theoretical construct there set up to help you predetermine your own dreams and desires through your own experiences and behaviour. 20 FAQs for S.O.U.L is an introduction to this world. Subsequent story's and works will take you deeper into a greater understanding of S.O.U.L. and a collective digital consciousness .
'Your head rests on his chest. It is a gritty embrace. Of sandy residue and futility. Maybe it is conviction you cannot muster. To see this through and cut through the numbness of communication within which you can idealise a romance. You cannot spend so much time constructing a love simply through carefully manicured sentences of intent.'
Each issue of The Short Anthology uses a selection of work from one photographer as the stimulus for a collection of short stories. It brings together writers from around the world, encouraging them to share their varied narratives and interpretations of the photographs.
Included in this collection is my story entitled The Wave. The wave explores how romantic encounters linger maybe longer than they should as we sustain a connection through a digital window into the loved one's world.
Each issue of The Short Anthology uses a selection of work from one photographer as the stimulus for a collection of short stories. It brings together writers from around the world, encouraging them to share their varied narratives and interpretations of the photographs.
Included in this collection is my story entitled The Wave. The wave explores how romantic encounters linger maybe longer than they should as we sustain a connection through a digital window into the loved one's world.
A story in the form of a screenplay, which looks at two generations of immigrant disillusionment, but also mental illness in the urban environment and culminating in the riots of 2011.
Published in the 'Coming of Age' issue of Under the Influence magazine.
Published in the 'Coming of Age' issue of Under the Influence magazine.
SELECTED ESSAYS
Engaging new relational syntheses of memory and language. READ HERE
Entropy Magazine published my exploratory essay using the mechanics of nature's swarming species to explore the changes in language, cognition and perception today and who actually owns language. You can read the full essay here.
"Our language, certainly our new language, is beholden to this new congealing of experience and story. We use our experience of fictional tropes to speak new common image-driven languages, while words have taken on new thrillingly malevolent dynamism within this autonomous swarm. A diet of superhero futurist fantasy sets off absolute drivers of binary comprehensions of experience. Yet, it is clear Hollywood won't save you. Arguably, one of the clearest drivers of a new language being formed is the whipping up of us into a custom framework for hysteria. Dissemination, deflection and chaos become a practice to withstand and decode; an embrace of the surreal and the postmodern become themselves sharp edged tools of weaponization."
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"Our language, certainly our new language, is beholden to this new congealing of experience and story. We use our experience of fictional tropes to speak new common image-driven languages, while words have taken on new thrillingly malevolent dynamism within this autonomous swarm. A diet of superhero futurist fantasy sets off absolute drivers of binary comprehensions of experience. Yet, it is clear Hollywood won't save you. Arguably, one of the clearest drivers of a new language being formed is the whipping up of us into a custom framework for hysteria. Dissemination, deflection and chaos become a practice to withstand and decode; an embrace of the surreal and the postmodern become themselves sharp edged tools of weaponization."
Read More
An essay commissioned by Theatrum Mundi, for their publication entitled 'Interior Realms' which looks at the way home is both a space for cultural production and a symbol within the cultural landscape of the city.
My essay is about walking at night through lockdown and how the role of night changed as time did, what inspiration and solace it provided.
Interior Realms
A domain of reflection, a zone of imagination, a sphere of cosmic reverie, a field of observation, an empire of fleeting thoughts, a territory of contemplation, a province of desires, an orbit of fantasy. Sixteen new pieces of writing – essays, poems, prose poems, short stories – two interviews taking you to the kitchen table, spare bedroom, home office, home studio, garage, shed, bedroom, bathroom, garden, closet and, on one occasion, car productions. The book is accompanied by an audio compilation including ten homemade tracks that reflect the ways in which architectural spaces shape music production and how that music, in turn, transforms architecture's atmospheric qualities. Contributors:Alison Irvine/ Andrea Cetrulo / Casper Laing Ebbensgaard / Cecily Chua / Charlotte Law / Cucina Povera / ENDGAME / Flora Pitrolo / Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh / John Bingham-Hall / Labeja Kodua Okullu / Lyall Hakaraia / Marta Michalowska / Meghana Bisineer / Michael Salu / Niall Campbell / Pol Esteve Castelló / R.W.P/ Rut Blees Luxemburg / Satu Streatfield / Stephen Sutcliffe / Victor Ginesta / Vladimir Muratovski Divo aka Elektro Kultura / William Messenger
My essay is about walking at night through lockdown and how the role of night changed as time did, what inspiration and solace it provided.
Interior Realms
A domain of reflection, a zone of imagination, a sphere of cosmic reverie, a field of observation, an empire of fleeting thoughts, a territory of contemplation, a province of desires, an orbit of fantasy. Sixteen new pieces of writing – essays, poems, prose poems, short stories – two interviews taking you to the kitchen table, spare bedroom, home office, home studio, garage, shed, bedroom, bathroom, garden, closet and, on one occasion, car productions. The book is accompanied by an audio compilation including ten homemade tracks that reflect the ways in which architectural spaces shape music production and how that music, in turn, transforms architecture's atmospheric qualities. Contributors:Alison Irvine/ Andrea Cetrulo / Casper Laing Ebbensgaard / Cecily Chua / Charlotte Law / Cucina Povera / ENDGAME / Flora Pitrolo / Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh / John Bingham-Hall / Labeja Kodua Okullu / Lyall Hakaraia / Marta Michalowska / Meghana Bisineer / Michael Salu / Niall Campbell / Pol Esteve Castelló / R.W.P/ Rut Blees Luxemburg / Satu Streatfield / Stephen Sutcliffe / Victor Ginesta / Vladimir Muratovski Divo aka Elektro Kultura / William Messenger
An ancient necropolis in Ibiza makes for an interesting location from which to ruminate on the possibility of an afterlife for the earth and her humans.
Also now available to read on Medium.
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Also now available to read on Medium.
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An essay reviewing Brett Bailey's Exhibit B.
My essay included in this anthology, was a semotically-flecked wander around New York for the first time. Taking in the contrasts and the breadth of American exceptionalism internationally, I wandered through moments and experiences.
The divide between rich and poor in New York is growing ever wider. In this collection of essays and short stories, writers from Zadie Smith to Dave Eggers look at how it has changed; at what has been lost and what, if anything, remains the same.
In a city where the top one percent earns more than half a million dollars per year while 25 thousand children are homeless, public discourse about our entrenched and worsening wealth gap has never been more sorely needed. This remarkable anthology is the literary world's response, with leading lights including Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz and Lydia Davis bearing witness to the experience of ordinary New Yorkers in extraordinarily unequal circumstances.
Through fiction and reportage, these writers convey the indignities and heartbreak, the callousness and solidarities, of living side by side with people of starkly different means. They shed light on the subterranean lives of homeless people who must find a bed in the city's tunnels; the stresses that gentrification can bring to neighbours in a Brooklyn apartment block; the shenanigans of seriously alienated night-shift paralegals; the trials of a housing defendant standing up for tenants' rights and the humanity that survives in the midst of a deeply divided city. TALES OF TWO CITIES is a brilliant, moving and ultimately galvanizing clarion call for a city in crisis.
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The divide between rich and poor in New York is growing ever wider. In this collection of essays and short stories, writers from Zadie Smith to Dave Eggers look at how it has changed; at what has been lost and what, if anything, remains the same.
In a city where the top one percent earns more than half a million dollars per year while 25 thousand children are homeless, public discourse about our entrenched and worsening wealth gap has never been more sorely needed. This remarkable anthology is the literary world's response, with leading lights including Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz and Lydia Davis bearing witness to the experience of ordinary New Yorkers in extraordinarily unequal circumstances.
Through fiction and reportage, these writers convey the indignities and heartbreak, the callousness and solidarities, of living side by side with people of starkly different means. They shed light on the subterranean lives of homeless people who must find a bed in the city's tunnels; the stresses that gentrification can bring to neighbours in a Brooklyn apartment block; the shenanigans of seriously alienated night-shift paralegals; the trials of a housing defendant standing up for tenants' rights and the humanity that survives in the midst of a deeply divided city. TALES OF TWO CITIES is a brilliant, moving and ultimately galvanizing clarion call for a city in crisis.
Read more
A letter to home, from the diaspora.
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SELECTED TALKS & OTHER BITS
Red Earth is an ongoing artistic, interdisciplinary study by Michael Salu, 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.
"Is there a case to suggest that language as we know it doesn't actually belong to us anymore?"5x15Amsterdam third speaker Michael Salu explores how technology impacts languages, social behaviour and ultimately, alters our ability to perceive.
Michael Salu is a writer, artist and critic, whose work and ideas are executed through a multidisciplinary practice. His writing, art and talks have focused on where the evolving semantics of technology, language and identity meet.
His written work has appeared in a number of literary journals, anthologies and art publications including Freeman's Journal and Catapult. He has exhibited and screened art projects internationally and is the owner and creative director of S.A.L.U, a multidisciplinary creative consultancy collaborating with clients around the globe.
Recorded at 5x15 in Amsterdam in March 2019.
5x15 Amsterdam brings together 5 outstanding speakers, who each have 15 minutes to share their lives, dreams and passions.
Listen here
Michael Salu is a writer, artist and critic, whose work and ideas are executed through a multidisciplinary practice. His writing, art and talks have focused on where the evolving semantics of technology, language and identity meet.
His written work has appeared in a number of literary journals, anthologies and art publications including Freeman's Journal and Catapult. He has exhibited and screened art projects internationally and is the owner and creative director of S.A.L.U, a multidisciplinary creative consultancy collaborating with clients around the globe.
Recorded at 5x15 in Amsterdam in March 2019.
5x15 Amsterdam brings together 5 outstanding speakers, who each have 15 minutes to share their lives, dreams and passions.
Listen here
I spoke at #Narrative17 a conference held by the Initiative of Narrative Journalism in Amsterdam. Fellow speakers included journalists such as chair Jaqcui Banaszynski, CNN's John Sutter & NPRs Lulu Miller. My talk was an overview of my current thinking space on the altering of perception, new instant mythologies and the binary relationship between aggregation of information and obfuscation. Exploring the relationship between all this and accelerated technologies on is the essence of my current fiction and art project, also looking at the potential power of fiction as a critical device in these new spaces.
You can read a transcript excerpt here
You can read a transcript excerpt here
A meditation on existence. Reading Inger Christensen's Alphabet, with HKW, Berlin.
Listen here
Listen here
A reading of works around corporeality and the machine.
Watch here
Watch here
A vocal collaboration for a track on Laurel Halo's Album, DUST.
Listen here
Listen here
My conversation with John Freeman over at Lithub, discussing the evolving nature of the image, from photography through to neural networks.
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Our lives are massively bombarded by images. Should we celebrate that fact or dread its consequences? As a creator of images, Michael Salu is interested in communication they provoke. Can communication through images nd our advancement with digital experiences actually help us reach a greater level of empathy for each other?
Forthcoming October 1 from Calamari Archive (Press), NYC
Created as part of the Planetary Portals collective
How to reach me