Air
2022
We were invited by the Wellcome Collection to visually respond to their new series of essays on 'air'. Entitled Something in the Air, five essays from writers Chloe Arijdis, Elvia Wilk, Vanessa Peterson, Dodie Bellamy and Will Alexander muse on our fraught and fragile relationship with the earth's atmosphere.

Our response is a spatial 360 virtual diorama – an atmosphere of sorts – which holds individual concepts for all five essays; each one accompanying an essay on the Wellcome Collection website. You can read them now and see the artwork on the Wellcome Collection website.
The Five artworks:

1. Unnatural
2.Debris
3.Artery
4.Cell Formation
5.Respiratory Matrix


Concept by Michael Salu
3D world design by Michael Salu
Illustration and visualisation by Michael Salu
A Virtual Diorama

Spatial views of this concept of atmospheres, thinking about air and atmosphere, at micro and macro levels.
Some sketching in the development of the elements built in 3D, inspired by membranes, particles and cell structures.
The diorama taking form. A hemisphere.
Schematic development work, where we put elements together, to interact and animate in a three-dimensional environment
UNNATURAL
CELL TRANSFORMATION
DEBRIS
ARTERY
RESPIRATORY MATRIX
ALL FIVE ARTWORKS

Selected Projects

Both complete works and experiments, thinking never breaks stride.
Check back in as we add more.
Listening to the Red Earth
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
A poetic art piece about technocracy in the UK told in augmented reality.
Planetary Portals
Responding to imperial archives with game engine software. A Film by Michael Salu.
"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
The Red Earth Project
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.