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.
Listening to the Red Earth
2023—
This film 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 – inhumane 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.
Listening to the Red Earth was first performed at Gropius Bau Museum, Berlin, in October 2023 and since has been performed at the British Library, London and the Royal College of Art.

Visit theredearthproject.org for more.

Cinematography: Michael Salu & Lee Tesche
Digital design and sculpture: Michael Salu
Editing: Michael Salu
Music: Lee Tesche
Sound design: Michael Salu
Images from the performance in the Gropius Bau cinema, Berlin. October 2023.
Exhibitions, Events & Publications

Gropius Bau Museum, Berlin. October 2023
Royal College of Art, London. December 2023
British Library, London. December 2023
Red Earth Book launch & Planetary Portals, Peckham Levels, London. December 2023.

Selected Projects

Both complete works and experiments, thinking never breaks stride.
Check back in as we add more.
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 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.⁠⁠
Responding to imperial archives with game engine software. A Film by Michael Salu.
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
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