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?

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.

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Visit Unthinking Photography for an extension of the 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.

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 (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.

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.

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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.

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