I am in your dreams, but you are not in mine  takes archival photographs from British colonialism in South Africa to create a series of single shot films that interrogate the dreams of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The photographs are sourced from the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, which holds the papers of Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902), a British mining magnate and imperialist in South Africa who left a violent legacy.

The films shake up colonial world views by showing how generative AI repeats the racial paradigms that defined extraction in the late 19th century, reproducing these logics in the present. As a contemporary comparison to the mining of minerals, generative AI relies on data that is mined to create large language models (LLMs). LLMs are fed primarily by English language data, consigning local languages and knowledge to an unknown (and unknowable) place in the AI archive.

Manual animations are also introduced across the films, evocative of the quiet work of resistance to continuing colonial violence. We invite you to consider what is the AI archive and how does it remember?

For Planetary Portals, ‘the animations present and maintain resistant cultural imaginations that lie beyond and in opposition to imperial visions and extractive logics.’

A creative research group around critical and artistic practice, Planetary Portals (Casper Laing Ebbensgaard, Kerry Holden, Michael Salu & Kathryn Yusoff) interrogates the continued colonial legacies and geo-traumas as they extend from mining gold and diamonds in South Africa to the renewed scramble for African minerals and data that fuel global digital economies.⁠⁠

For the films, Planetary Portals have developed a method to interrogate colonial ways of seeing:

1. The Photograph
Photography served as a powerful imperial technology. Settlers commissioned albums to capture vast, seemingly empty landscapes.

Nothing is as it seems: while the photographs show white subjects in a triumphalist mood, they also create a shadow of those silenced by white supremacy.

2. Re/script
The texts that appear at the bottom of the films write into the negative spaces of the image. Combined with sections of the archival photographs, this text is fed into several large language models (LLMs). The unedited assumptions output by these LLMs are then presented.

The text, as seen in the films and by the machine, holds a conflict. It both erases and repairs.

3. Hallucinate
The archive photograph combined with the texts becomes a puzzle that the LLMs attempt to solve with pattern recognition, exposing how its ‘solutions’ are founded on historical racial logics of subjugation, erasure and expulsion.

The outputs are painted into compositions which become counterintuitive to Western visual culture, drawing attention to what goes unseen.

4. Resist
Layered across the films are manual animations foregrounding the sensory poetics of landscapes, weather and bodily movements.

The animations reinscribe the image with emotions and human agency erased by colonial memory.

Credits

• Creative and technical lead: House of Thought
• Writing and research: Planetary Portals
• Artistic concept creation and film direction: House of Thought
• ML/AI development: House of Thought
• Game engine design and animation: House of Thought
• Motion capture animation: House of Thought
• Editing and post-production: House of Thought
• Cinematography and art direction: House of Thought
• Sound design © Kyprian Rainey
• Exhibition installation design: House of Thought, Planetary Portals

More info:
Artist Talk
Online expansion

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.

Runtime 42.00. Premiered at Transmediale, Berlin in 2023.

Credits

• Concept creation and film direction: Michael Salu
• Creative and technical lead: Michael Salu
• Writer: Michael Salu
• Cinematography: Michael Salu
• Game engine design and animation: Michael Salu
• Motion capture animation: Michael Salu
• Editing and Post Production: Michael Salu
• Producer: Michael Salu
• Sound design: Kyprian Rainey

More info about the project can be found here:
Director's note
House of Thought

Losing is Ours, a modern take on the epic poem, is an introduction to a forthcoming feature-length film meditation.

This Dante-inspired work reflects on the intricacies of modern life, from the intimate to the planetary, as we do or do not relate to the different material compositions of our world. Taking the point of view of a low-frequency radio wave, we journey through materials, time zones and atmospheres as a quiet observer, folding time, contemplating the human species, flora, fauna and geology across history, both recorded and forgotten, poignantly resisting societal cynicism, and instead conjuring and celebrating the poetic imagination.

This project is a collaboration between Lee Tesche, a Florida-based artist and musician renowned for his work with the band Algiers, and Berlin-based British Nigerian writer and artist Michael Salu.

Salu's book Red Earth, which this film is intricately related to, was published by Calamari Archive in 2023.

Runtime (short film) 7:20 mins
Runtime (feature) 70 mins (approx)

• Written by Michael Salu
• Directed by Michael Salu & Lee Tesche
• Edited by Michael Salu
• Score by Lee Tesche, with support from Algiers and friends.
• Cinematography by Lee Tesche, Sam Campbell, Ian C & Sinan Germi & Michael Salu
• Produced by Lee Tesche & Michael Salu

Premiered at Gropius Bau Museum, Berlin and later screened and performed at The British Library and The Royal College of Art, Listening to the Red Earth was created to be presented alongside live readings from Michael Salu's book Red Earth, with additional live sound elements taken from the book. In this performative reading, artist, writer and scholar Michael Salu opens up the cinema space for a meditation on listening to the polyphonous dimensions of earth – inhuman and human – and to the frequencies of colonial afterlives.

Drawing from his recent literary work, Red Earth (2023), Salu coalesces sound, words, image and space into a multi-sensual choreography on selfhood, grief and loss meshing towards nonhuman perspectives. 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 one can use computational translation to engage other knowledge systems.

• Directed by: Michael Salu Cinematography: Michael Salu & Lee Tesche
• Digital/3D art and animation: Michael Salu
• Editing: Michael Salu
• Music: Lee Tesche
• Sound design: Michael Salu

More information about the project: The Red Earth Project

In this video, the prose, video, virtual sculptures, and virtual environments (deriving from computational translations of the prose) meet to evoke consideration for cultural dissonances experienced by existing across geographical and cross-cultural realities, observed through attempts at non-linear time/space inspired by Yoruba mythology, which can be potentially responded to in virtual space and is also illustrated in part by the looping of the video.

Solitary Breath
12 minutes.
Single channel video loop.
2021.

• Directed by: Michael Salu
• Cinematography: Michael Salu
• Digital/3D art and animation: Michael Salu
• Editing and post porudction: Michael Salu

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.

This film was exhibited on The Great Wall of Oalkand in 2016.

Runtime 36 mins single channel.

• DIrected by Michael Salu
• Cinematography by Jacob Robinson

A man alone with the night. Commissioned specially for Piano Day 2016, Nocturnes is a little film exploring intimacy and the procreative power of insomnia.

Piano Day is a worldwide celebration of the Piano founded by Nils Frahm.

• Director: Michael Salu
• Featuring: Adam Longman Parker
• Director of Photography: Lukas Feigelfeld
• Sound mixing and location: Vox-Ton Studios Berlin