Annulet: A Journal of Poetics publishes poetry, prose, and literary criticism. Issue 7, richly populated, includes one of my texts from a little while back on displacement of memories, cultural knowledge, materials and bodies under rancorous Tory rule (and historically beyond). Also in memory of Grenfell. Read here.

Sample:

"Feet all around stomped his confusion into firm ashes of memories razed and crumbled beneath fallen tower blocks: family dinners, arguments, and dancehalls, within jerk chicken smoke, we'd hang low to sniff the nape of our dance partner's neck— which smelled sweet, of exuberant burning, no tropes, reflective rhetoric, or dark circles of inertia, representing them or us, or 'I & I'. Dirt formed into mounds, mounds poured into moulds, moulds; geometric, orderly and tessellating, from foundational blocks to the tiling of a game of experimental formulas; juggling and juxtaposing donations to purpose, spinning hope's wheel, twisting fate as if anything else were statistically possible or even inclined, but an increase in value to geometrically moulded earth piled high, craning towards breathable air and the touch of a filtered sun against their skin."

From my work-in-progress novel of the same name.

'His artworks roved the streets, or rested, or hid away in a bedroom. They got into fights and fucked and fell in love. They got wet in the river nearby and dried themselves out in the sun, necking coloured sugar waters to quench their thirst. Or they got dried out by poorly processed hard water, dribbling weakly from their bathroom taps, leaving them ashy as foreign limescale ate away at their skin. They'd lotion-up and moisturise with shea butters or their derivatives, manually mixing with baby oils and natural heat from their palms, rubbing them together to soften the mixture enough to be spreadable across Jack's fine drawings, their canvases, rubbing and massaging the mixture in, trying to push this balm deep beneath the surface, trying hard to really nourish themselves, as if the balm might heal more of them than they could see, as if it might reach more than needle bruises, or the caustic legacies of poisoned waters.'

A short text on fate, climate and late capitalism. Published by Sleepingfish from Calamari Archive.

'I shivered, staring involuntarily into space where damage received language from an earth turning approximately one thousand miles every hour. How so, shards of bone pointing skywards—two rhomboidal megaliths of optimism's past—a Soviet monument. I sometimes think about Man.'

'Maybe this collective storyteller has already usurped the solo storyteller, in ways neither collective nor solo storytellers are yet aware of.'

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

'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.

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.

A short essay that gets to the heart of the matter.

An extract from the essay which closes my book Red Earth.

Engaging new relational syntheses of memory and language. READ HERE

Hear the creative research group, Planetary Portals, discuss AI technologies and working with archival photography — themes from their current exhibition

A two-part deep dive interview-essay about my anthology 'Cybernetics, or Ghosts?' and more work more broadly engaging the field of Cybernetics and beyond.
Part 1 Part 2

An interview with writer, artist, filmmaker, editor and creative strategist Michael Salu, who has edited 'Cybernetics, or Ghosts?', an anthology of short fiction written in response to Calvino's essay Cybernetics and Ghosts. We discuss film-making, AI, storytelling and, of course, Italo Calvino.

A wide-ranging conversation about the world of Red Earth and more.

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 – inhumane and human – and to the frequencies of colonial afterlives. Drawing from his recent literary work, RedEarth (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.

Mapping how ‘diabolical architectures’ of colonial materialism hold open Africa as a continent for extraction, Kathryn Yusoff, Kerry Holden, Casper Laing Ebbensgaard, and Michael Salu explore how this legacy of infrastructural space and imaginary practices continues today. Based on their research in the Rhodes archives, their collaborative work responds to the erosion of histories that underwrote the territorial advance of imperial greed. The European dream of a portal to expand time and space, imagined at a continental scale, placed Africa into a vortex of racial debt relations and extraction. This planetary portal, with its emancipatory promises of transformation of the African continent rising, from speculative finance to material infrastructures continues in the present. Attending to the relation between the mine and the organisation of calculative life in the recursive tail of race and colonialism, Planetary Portals considers colonialism as an ongoing present. Diving into the time-space praxis of colonial history and the on-going shadows of its worlding, the group explores the process of taking this portal apart – destabilising points of stabilisation, and disrupting legacies of time and space that hold.

A moderated conversation between the group and Helen Pritchard follows the lecture-performance accompanied by moving image works.

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.