House of Thought

A creative research lab.
House of Thought is an independent creative research lab, founded by Michael Salu, investigating how emerging technologies intersect with and affect culture, society and human experience.

Through rigorous inquiry and cross-cultural speculative design thinking, we explore tomorrow's challenges today.


We believe technology should serve ideas and creative culture, which are crucial to societal and environmental improvement.

Our research spans cultural preservation in digital spaces, computational morality, cross-cultural technology adoption, and speculative futures design.


Working with academic institutions, cultural organisations, and forward-thinking partners, we develop frameworks, insights and prototypes for how we might relate to tomorrow.

Selected Projects

I am in your dreams, but you are not in mine
Hallucinations of empire and the AI archive
Cybernetics, or Ghosts? A New Anthology of Fiction
Edited by writer and artist Michael Salu, fifteen of today's most daring writers from across the globe read and respond to Italo Calvino's seminal essay 'Cybernetics and Ghosts' with rich and expansive works of fiction.
The Red Earth Project
A critical study of machine learning (AI). Red Earth is an expansive interdisciplinary artistic study, where machine learning is central to various processes to ask whether computational translation can be used to engage alternative cosmologies.
"Cybernetics and Ghosts" the digital future of writing
A guest edition by Michael Salu for Writer's Mosaic on authorship, computation and the origin of myth and story. inspired by the essay of the same name by Italo Calvino
Planetary Portals | D.A.O.C, film. | A creative research group exploring extraction archives
Responding to imperial archives with critical engagement with new technologies.
Losing is Ours, a film
An exploratory, meditative film thinking about modern existence, as we relate or do not relate to the material composition of our world.
Listening to the Red Earth, film. | A film performance developed from The Red Earth Project, which explores how artificial intelligence engages other knowledge systems.
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.
Apollyon's Ghosts, Augmented Reality installation
A poetic art piece about technocracy in the UK told in augmented reality.
'Air' for the Wellcome Collection
A virtual diorama of atmospheres
more projects
The Latest at House of Thought
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