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Error Sludge: Digital archeology
2024—
We're constantly conducting digital archaeology, as it's a realm in constant flux.

We think it's important to register moments, and we do so with a speculative, narrative archive, sometimes making temporally slippery digital renditions into physical pieces.

These are from a new limited-edition series of works we're developing from a Chrome browser hack.

Computer vision is an interesting source of theoretical reflection, especially when we consider the moral authority digital platforms assume.

How are we taught what to see?
Diabolical Architectures of Colonialism (2023)

A lone spectre drags their injured body across a barren landscape decimated by numerous forms of extraction. What are they looking for?

This film explores time, labour, psychological, material and climate decimation in the afterlives of colonialism. Responding to data from the Cecil Rhodes archive 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 peeks at the haunted underside of perfect digital utopias, as the capture of land and resources, still shapes today's economic disparities and fantasies of interplanetary colonisation. An unknown narrator offers poetic musings throughout the film, drawing our attention to the negative spaces of extraction typically ignored by official records. What is the consequence of an economic system that stands on these legacies of extraction?
Created with game engine software, this film self-referentially asks whether emotional resonance is possible in imagined virtual futures powered by energy-intensive GPUs often using rare metals. It focuses on the complications of the present moment when more energy is required for more innovation, to an end we are not yet sure of, where often invisible limping spectres across time and space, still communicate something important to us.

Director: Michael Salu
Writer: Michael Salu
Sound: design Kyprian Rainey
Producer: Michael Salu
Cinematography: Michael Salu
Set Design: Michael Salu
Animation: Michael Salu
Art Director: Michael Salu
Editor: Michael Salu
Colour Grading: Michael Salu
Narration: Michael Salu
Exhibitions, Events & Publications

Planetary Portals: "Dreaming in Continents" from East London to the Cape in the Colonial Praxis of Emergence and Extraction. Gropius Bau Journal

Screening and Lecture/Performance, Transmediale art & digital culture festival, Berlin January 2023.
Watch an early edit of the film below, created especially for Transmediale, February 2023

Planetary Portals in FOAM Magazine, August 2023

A Director's note

Selected Projects

Both complete works and experiments, thinking never breaks stride.
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