Research
Cartography Is Not Home
Maps drew the lines of extraction. Algorithms redraw them at scale.
Cartography Is Not Home examines how colonial ways of mapping persist inside contemporary technologies. A map decides what is worth naming and what can be left out. Those decisions were not left in the archive. They are running now, in the systems that sort land, people and knowledge.
I work with vintage atlas pages, soil recordings, DNA sonification and field research. The sheets are genuine, mostly late nineteenth century, marked by hand rather than reproduced. The sound is gathered where it occurs.
The body is a field sensor. Embodied knowing sits alongside textual research. Listening is a practice of attention and relation: staying with a place long enough to hear what it says, rather than taking a sample and leaving.
Co-produced with nature: soil, rivers, birdsong, spiders' webs. Where the work touches knowledge, people or lineage, consent and provenance are part of the method.
Every keynote, sitting and residency begins here.
The word human comes from humus. Soil. Yet the systems we build extract, classify and untether intelligence from its source. Cartography Is Not Home listens for what those systems miss: DNA, soil, sound and ancestral memory. The knowledge closest to the answer is still the least consulted.
Ancestral Intelligence + Artificial Intelligence = Augmented Intelligence
AI is a distant cousin of the soil, captured by extractive infrastructure and taught to take rather than listen. This is not a case against technology. Some of what these systems do is genuinely useful, and the work uses them. The question is what they are taught to do with what they find. We're not in a tech crisis. We're in a listening crisis. What becomes possible when we remember that intelligences are entangled and animate?
Every piece began as a question.
2018
Four Freedoms™
Who gets to be free, and who gets to be heard?
2019
Cyborg Shamanism™
What if our technology is already a ritual?
2020
The Myth of the Ego
Who are we when we live through screens?
2021
The A to Z
What about people and technology is still unanswered?
2022
Stillness
What does the body know that the mind can't hurry?
2023
Elemental Echoes
What does the future sound like with more voices in it?
2024
TERRA Method™
Can we lead from the body as well as the mind?
2025
Presence as Technology
What if attention is our oldest technology?
2026
Cartography Is Not Home
Whose map is AI drawing?
In collaboration
A-ya Kukamíria Majé, Kukama-Kukamíria peopleIndigenous knowledge guidance and Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) mentorship.
All partnerships follow Free, Prior, and Informed Consent principles.