Selected Projects
With a professional background deep in visual culture, I now work with a variety of media to develop ideas and areas of research.
Much of my process is continuous and over recent years I have developed thought and experimentation that extracts distillations of translations between forms, driven of course, by technology.
My research is underscored by a primarily literary and artistic practice, but these interrogations overlap with art history, computation, geography, sociology, linguistics and philosophy as I try to find ways to engage with fine textures of the human condition.
Visit House of Thought for more.
Much of my process is continuous and over recent years I have developed thought and experimentation that extracts distillations of translations between forms, driven of course, by technology.
My research is underscored by a primarily literary and artistic practice, but these interrogations overlap with art history, computation, geography, sociology, linguistics and philosophy as I try to find ways to engage with fine textures of the human condition.
Visit House of Thought for more.
I am in your dreams, but you are not in mine
Hallucinations of empire and the AI archive
I am in your dreams, but you are not in mine is a new exhibition and commission by the collective Planetary Portals at The Photographers’ Gallery from 7 March 2025. Interrogating archival photography and artificial intelligence (AI), the exhibition weaves together the environmental landscapes of 19th-century mining of gold and diamonds in South Africa with the scripting process of AI.
The exhibition asks how have diverse languages become compressed into one singular coding language and questions whose voices are not allowed to speak through the colonial archive. Whose voices are silenced, whose lives erased, and what materials cannot be archived?
The exhibition asks how have diverse languages become compressed into one singular coding language and questions whose voices are not allowed to speak through the colonial archive. Whose voices are silenced, whose lives erased, and what materials cannot be archived?
Central to the exhibition is a series of single-shot films that use a variety of generative AI and digital processes, crafted from archival photographs sourced from the Papers of Cecil Rhodes at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Photography was an essential technology of imperial communication and a space of trespass and refusal, where subjects challenged the present and intent of colonial place-making.
The photographs in the exhibition provide a visual vocabulary of the “environment” of Rhodes and his legacy – from his origins in Hackney, East London to the diamond fields of South Africa – and provide a “portal” for critically engaging with the extractive logics of AI. The resulting works offer new narratives by exposing the gaps in large language models (LLMs) and the structural racial logics of universal norms.
Find out more
The photographs in the exhibition provide a visual vocabulary of the “environment” of Rhodes and his legacy – from his origins in Hackney, East London to the diamond fields of South Africa – and provide a “portal” for critically engaging with the extractive logics of AI. The resulting works offer new narratives by exposing the gaps in large language models (LLMs) and the structural racial logics of universal norms.
Find out more
The Red Earth Project
Started in 2019, 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.
This research asks how alternative cosmologies can be better represented within virtual architectures powered by AI innovation.
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.
Diabolical Architectures of Colonialism
Diabolical Architectures of Colonialism (2023), a research-based film, is a durational, allegorical response to the voices absent from data critically analysed in the Cecil Rhodes archive (held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford) from times during the Kimberley diamond rush (1871), South African gold rushes (1873-1886), and African expansion as a result of British, German, and Portuguese imperialism.
A speculative invocation of awkward spectres encapsulating both the injured body and the haunted injurious body of colonial legacy renders the negative spaces of extraction. Inspired by The Divine Comedy, speaking to colonialism's temporal and psychological relentlessness, this film peeks at the haunted underside of perfect digital utopias, as the capture of resources still shapes today’s global economic disparities and interplanetary colonisation fantasies. Accompanied by a slowly building score evoking material earth, an unknown narrator offers poetic musings on these absences.
A speculative invocation of awkward spectres encapsulating both the injured body and the haunted injurious body of colonial legacy renders the negative spaces of extraction. Inspired by The Divine Comedy, speaking to colonialism's temporal and psychological relentlessness, this film peeks at the haunted underside of perfect digital utopias, as the capture of resources still shapes today’s global economic disparities and interplanetary colonisation fantasies. Accompanied by a slowly building score evoking material earth, an unknown narrator offers poetic musings on these absences.
Created almost entirely in Unity 3D, the game engine software, this film subverts the three-act hero structure. It demands the viewer to stay with its temporal conceit, as it conceptually engages the legacies of time, labour, psychological, material, and climate decimation in colonialism's afterlives, examining how one's cultural history and current reality are embedded and continued within these evasive bureaucratic languages, ledgers, and legacies.
Find out more
Find out more
Apollyon's Ghosts
An augmented reality poem
Poetry in space. A poem about technocracy in the UK told in augmented reality. The poem and Augmented Reality presentation explore the socio-political implications of increasingly centralised power's agency to edit 'reality'. 'Real world' sound fragments build on the spatial augmentation. This project was created before and during the pandemic, which significantly changed our lives, and is reflected in the altered use of public space. The poem first appeared in text form in the inaugural issue of The Dark Preview, a research collective.
Apollyon's Ghosts was exhibited as a multimedia installation in the group exhibition, Midnight Sun at Black Tower Projects, London 2021.
Find out more
Find out more
The Planetary Portals project examines the colonial afterlife of gold and diamond mining in South Africa by drawing attention to the social and environmental costs of extractive industries. In collaboration with Kaythryn Yusoff (QMUL), Kerry Holden (QMUL) and Casper Laing Ebbensgaard (UEA), we examine how colonial dreams of Empire have been and still are sustained through 'changes of states' – that is, turning clay into bricks, bricks into speculative real estate, real estate into capital, capital into a speculative mining, and diamonds and gold into racialised dreams of Empire.
From gleaming skyscrapers in the City of London and the Rhodes estate in London's East End to the gold and diamond mines in South Africa, the colonial legacy of the extractive industries create an uneven geography where the vertical city can be mirror massed in networks of shadow architectures that stretch through quarries, shafts and mines. We develop the portal as a speculative archival method for examining geo-social inequities that were necessary in sustaining spatial imaginaries and dreams of Empire through these shadow architectures of vertical expansion in the emergence and maintenance of extractive planetary futures.
The visual and narrative explorations for this project, examine the potential of virtual architectures, terrain and topographies, to bridge epochs of time to reflect on the legacies of extraction. From 19th century origins of the mines, to where these resources end up today, and the impact they have on society, bodies and lives. This artistic project—a muti-channel film work—brings to light the negative space of these histories.
Diabolical Architectures of Colonialism is a durational, allegorical film created in response to data from the Cecil Rhodes archive (held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford) from times during the Kimberley diamond rush (1871), South African gold rushes (1873-1886), and African expansion as a result of British, German, and Portuguese imperialism.
A speculative invocation of awkward spectres, inspired in part by Dante, peeks at the haunted underside of perfect digital utopias, as the capture of land and resources, still shapes today's economic disparities and fantasies of interplanetary colonisation. Accompanied by slowly building subterranean sound, an unknown narrator offers poetic musings throughout the film, drawing our attention to the negative spaces of extraction typically ignored by official records.
Created almost entirely in Unity 3D, the game engine software, this film conceptually engages the legacies of time, labour, psychological, material and climate decimation in the after-lives of colonialism. The poetic interludes scattered throughout the film, draw attention to the negative spaces of extraction neglected by official records, examining how one's cultural history and current reality is embedded within these legacies.
DAOCFILM.ORG
More at House of Thought.
From gleaming skyscrapers in the City of London and the Rhodes estate in London's East End to the gold and diamond mines in South Africa, the colonial legacy of the extractive industries create an uneven geography where the vertical city can be mirror massed in networks of shadow architectures that stretch through quarries, shafts and mines. We develop the portal as a speculative archival method for examining geo-social inequities that were necessary in sustaining spatial imaginaries and dreams of Empire through these shadow architectures of vertical expansion in the emergence and maintenance of extractive planetary futures.
The visual and narrative explorations for this project, examine the potential of virtual architectures, terrain and topographies, to bridge epochs of time to reflect on the legacies of extraction. From 19th century origins of the mines, to where these resources end up today, and the impact they have on society, bodies and lives. This artistic project—a muti-channel film work—brings to light the negative space of these histories.
Diabolical Architectures of Colonialism is a durational, allegorical film created in response to data from the Cecil Rhodes archive (held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford) from times during the Kimberley diamond rush (1871), South African gold rushes (1873-1886), and African expansion as a result of British, German, and Portuguese imperialism.
A speculative invocation of awkward spectres, inspired in part by Dante, peeks at the haunted underside of perfect digital utopias, as the capture of land and resources, still shapes today's economic disparities and fantasies of interplanetary colonisation. Accompanied by slowly building subterranean sound, an unknown narrator offers poetic musings throughout the film, drawing our attention to the negative spaces of extraction typically ignored by official records.
Created almost entirely in Unity 3D, the game engine software, this film conceptually engages the legacies of time, labour, psychological, material and climate decimation in the after-lives of colonialism. The poetic interludes scattered throughout the film, draw attention to the negative spaces of extraction neglected by official records, examining how one's cultural history and current reality is embedded within these legacies.
DAOCFILM.ORG
More at House of Thought.
Incredulous souls shivered involuntarily, 2023
Computational explorations between non-western and western ontology
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. This research asks how alternative cosmologies can be better represented within virtual architectures powered by probabalistic computation.
More information at theredearthproject.org
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. This research asks how alternative cosmologies can be better represented within virtual architectures powered by probabalistic computation.
More information at theredearthproject.org
Poetry in space. A poem about technocracy in the UK told in augmented reality. The poem and AR presentation explore the socio-political implications of increasingly centralised power's agency to edit 'reality'. 'Real world' sound fragments build on the spatial augmentation. This project was created before and while the pandemic changed our lives, obviously noticeable in the changing use of public space. The poem first appeared in text form in the inaugural issue of The Dark Preview, a research collective.
Apollyon's Ghost was exhibited as a multimedia installation in the group exhibition, Midnight Sun at Black Tower Projects, London 2021.
Apollyon's Ghost was exhibited as a multimedia installation in the group exhibition, Midnight Sun at Black Tower Projects, London 2021.
The City of London is undergoing rapid transformation. The sand sacks that occur in large numbers on the streets of the city are overlooked by-products of the monumental building works currently reshaping London. This 'objet trouve', almost worthless but containing multiple ambiguous meanings is the centre of this work.
Artist and academic Rut Blees Luxemburg, working together with the writer and artist Michael Salu, instigates a series of 'bill boards' that feature the ubiquitous sacks.
Continuing our collaborative work, process Blees Luxemburg and I explored the semantic data inherent within our urban landscapes and wondering whether an ephemeral deployment of the most rudimentary but ubiquitous linguistic form [in text and image], can itself be subverted to instead draw attention to the lost intangibles that must survive these city spaces as they evolve and consume without pause.
The Golden Sack exhibition was part of Urban Photo Fest 2016.
Exhibition photos © Stefano Carnelli
Artist and academic Rut Blees Luxemburg, working together with the writer and artist Michael Salu, instigates a series of 'bill boards' that feature the ubiquitous sacks.
Continuing our collaborative work, process Blees Luxemburg and I explored the semantic data inherent within our urban landscapes and wondering whether an ephemeral deployment of the most rudimentary but ubiquitous linguistic form [in text and image], can itself be subverted to instead draw attention to the lost intangibles that must survive these city spaces as they evolve and consume without pause.
The Golden Sack exhibition was part of Urban Photo Fest 2016.
Exhibition photos © Stefano Carnelli
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
Read More
A Film by Michael Salu.
36 mins single channel, or 3 mins 12 channel multiscreen installation.
Cinematography by Jacob Robinson.
"One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist, except in the darkness of our minds." James Baldwin
Shot in a single unscripted take, Yesterday is personal reflection on the hypersexualised and lucrative commodity of the black male image. Globally, yet most explicitly in America, the image or representation of the black male forms many of the building blocks of the economic infrastructure and gains of today's consumer class. From a privatised penitentiary system, right through to corporate conglomerates such as Apple, the image and the narrative of the black male is that of an indefatigable commodity within the American dream. This is probably most explicitly witnessed within the evolution of Hip Hop over the last twenty years from street-level oratory urgency and anger to becoming the defacto, benign middle class corporatised 'urbanity'. High fashion's appropriation of said urbanity and even the proliferation of 'ebonics' within internet vernacular also adds to this discourse of a perpetually prolific commodification.
Yet, but no different to 'yesterday', the black male image is almost completely disconnected from its lucrative economic value, increasingly so today given the top heavy trickle down from the large corporations buying up the language of the street and reselling their own voices back to them at a 500% mark up. Brilliantly re-affirming the unattainability of the American Dream.
The sheen of high fashion markets the parallel tropes of fear and desire of the black image back to us, the broader consumer market led principally by white male patriarchy allow us to consume this image, adopt its stance and its language, without ever really thinking about its restricted social or economic position within our globalised consumer society. The 'Thug Life' meme phenomena is an acute observation of this reality.
The sheen of high production and inevitable inherently politicised sexuality also masks the core experience within this film. We do not see this male's real experiences beyond the mediatised (desired or demonised) version of him. We do not see him vulnerable, or lonely, or even just having a haircut. Even the hair that is being cut comes with an inherent mystery still prevalent in conversation as why try to understand what dreadlocks are.
The film could only be really made once, as such a ritual would take another ten years or so to reproduce organically calling into question the relevance of materiality or authenticity. The ritual itself takes a flagellatory stance, questioning the codes of representation and ultimately the futility of chasing a visual representation of identity within an image culture the black male has little control of.
Asked within the film through its length, subject and static frame, is whether socio-economic position of blackness is escapable? Can there ever be a psychological reprieve from something systematically part of the foundations of how our modern world was built? Can you sit with this film through its banal duration and maybe also reflect on that which is inescapable from the black male who can not click away or close the browser window, as witnessed in the lives of many and those we've seen through the mediatised filter witness their own end through this hegemony. Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Trayvon Martin. They were clearly not cut in on the deal and nor could they just look away.
36 mins single channel, or 3 mins 12 channel multiscreen installation.
Cinematography by Jacob Robinson.
"One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist, except in the darkness of our minds." James Baldwin
Shot in a single unscripted take, Yesterday is personal reflection on the hypersexualised and lucrative commodity of the black male image. Globally, yet most explicitly in America, the image or representation of the black male forms many of the building blocks of the economic infrastructure and gains of today's consumer class. From a privatised penitentiary system, right through to corporate conglomerates such as Apple, the image and the narrative of the black male is that of an indefatigable commodity within the American dream. This is probably most explicitly witnessed within the evolution of Hip Hop over the last twenty years from street-level oratory urgency and anger to becoming the defacto, benign middle class corporatised 'urbanity'. High fashion's appropriation of said urbanity and even the proliferation of 'ebonics' within internet vernacular also adds to this discourse of a perpetually prolific commodification.
Yet, but no different to 'yesterday', the black male image is almost completely disconnected from its lucrative economic value, increasingly so today given the top heavy trickle down from the large corporations buying up the language of the street and reselling their own voices back to them at a 500% mark up. Brilliantly re-affirming the unattainability of the American Dream.
The sheen of high fashion markets the parallel tropes of fear and desire of the black image back to us, the broader consumer market led principally by white male patriarchy allow us to consume this image, adopt its stance and its language, without ever really thinking about its restricted social or economic position within our globalised consumer society. The 'Thug Life' meme phenomena is an acute observation of this reality.
The sheen of high production and inevitable inherently politicised sexuality also masks the core experience within this film. We do not see this male's real experiences beyond the mediatised (desired or demonised) version of him. We do not see him vulnerable, or lonely, or even just having a haircut. Even the hair that is being cut comes with an inherent mystery still prevalent in conversation as why try to understand what dreadlocks are.
The film could only be really made once, as such a ritual would take another ten years or so to reproduce organically calling into question the relevance of materiality or authenticity. The ritual itself takes a flagellatory stance, questioning the codes of representation and ultimately the futility of chasing a visual representation of identity within an image culture the black male has little control of.
Asked within the film through its length, subject and static frame, is whether socio-economic position of blackness is escapable? Can there ever be a psychological reprieve from something systematically part of the foundations of how our modern world was built? Can you sit with this film through its banal duration and maybe also reflect on that which is inescapable from the black male who can not click away or close the browser window, as witnessed in the lives of many and those we've seen through the mediatised filter witness their own end through this hegemony. Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Trayvon Martin. They were clearly not cut in on the deal and nor could they just look away.
A one shot musing on the procreative power of insomnia. Extracted from this private moment is an intimacy in its purest and somewhat illicit form with something one might hold dear. Do we ever see what the artist is feeling? A special artist commission for Piano Day 2016.
In Walker Evans and James Agee's 1936 book "Let us now Praise Famous Men", Evans and Agee conspired to illustrate the life of American sharecropper's plight during Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal highlighting the struggles of Americans living during the dust bowl years and the resulting poverty that ensued. Saccharine to the point of decay, the assignment was funded by Fortune magazine for which Evans worked.
Presently, Brad Feuerhelm has taken the iconic photo-literary tract of Evans and Agee and has appropriated the tract to inverse the use of the photographic image in a political dialogue through the act of violent destruction by physically shooting all 200+ copies of the book point blank with a glock .45 in the summer of 2014. The author was in his words "at war with the obnoxiously persistent and tentacled filament of the military industrial complex in America and the societal Disneyland (absurdity) that has invoked complacency over the mechanics of it at large".
Perhaps direct and somewhat abusive, the bullet that pierces each of the pages transcends the nominal photo-book into that of an anti-iconographic relic. The book becomes object in which violence has occurred and each of the portraits becomes a transgressive display of intolerance towards societal disregard for the economic war machine. Heads of several multi-national arms corporations, both domestic and international find their own image torn asunder by a violent act. The irony of which is that the book itself becomes an object to be re-sold to an audience pointing at the cyclical and futile irony of the presiding problem of complacency within the ever-expanding pursuit of capital largess through arms and military equipment sales.
Possibly the first book to be physically shot in such a manner, the accompanying text by Feuerhelm and Michael Salu point combatively to the problems of becoming complacent under life at its extremes.
Presently, Brad Feuerhelm has taken the iconic photo-literary tract of Evans and Agee and has appropriated the tract to inverse the use of the photographic image in a political dialogue through the act of violent destruction by physically shooting all 200+ copies of the book point blank with a glock .45 in the summer of 2014. The author was in his words "at war with the obnoxiously persistent and tentacled filament of the military industrial complex in America and the societal Disneyland (absurdity) that has invoked complacency over the mechanics of it at large".
Perhaps direct and somewhat abusive, the bullet that pierces each of the pages transcends the nominal photo-book into that of an anti-iconographic relic. The book becomes object in which violence has occurred and each of the portraits becomes a transgressive display of intolerance towards societal disregard for the economic war machine. Heads of several multi-national arms corporations, both domestic and international find their own image torn asunder by a violent act. The irony of which is that the book itself becomes an object to be re-sold to an audience pointing at the cyclical and futile irony of the presiding problem of complacency within the ever-expanding pursuit of capital largess through arms and military equipment sales.
Possibly the first book to be physically shot in such a manner, the accompanying text by Feuerhelm and Michael Salu point combatively to the problems of becoming complacent under life at its extremes.
A groundswell of nascent learning. A series of early deep learning experiments turned to face the abstractions of computer vision.