an endless fractal that writes itself in the languages of empire, and cannot silence what those languages were imposed upon.
A self-similar stream of code grows the way empire grows, branching, absorbing, overwriting, and never repeats. It is written in the administrative tongues of colonisation, and it switches between them at random.
Code itself is the deepest layer. Programming is an English based system, the dominant globalised colonial language, now built into every culture that computes. To write code at all is to write in the coloniser's grammar. This work makes that structure audible.
Beneath the code, each symbol is bound to a fragment of the colonised culture's music, so the culture sounds through the coloniser's script, triggered involuntarily by the machine. Extraction, enacted as form.
One flat synthetic voice reads every language aloud. It descends from the first machines to speak: Bell Labs' Voder (1939) and the IBM 704 singing Daisy Bell (1961), English speaking, uncanny, the model for HAL. The homogenising voice of the global model, held in Mori's uncanny valley.
Each culture is mapped to its homeland: coordinates, a regional palette, a tone drawn from its latitude, over a constant sub hum, the sonification of the ground we float on, turning in the universe.
When the camera is on, the machine watches, and it also extracts, quoting the academy that wrote about colonisation, pulling public domain Marxist and anarchist critique into the running code. The words that name extraction are themselves extracted.
Extraction is legalised by ownership. Copyright begins as a printing monopoly, the Statute of Anne of 1710, and is globalised through the Berne Convention of 1886, then WIPO, then the World Trade Organisation's TRIPS agreement of 1994, which binds nearly every country to a single regime of authorship. Its terms are written less by artists than by states and large corporations; the repeated extension of copyright, pushed by companies protecting a single character, shows whose interest the law serves.
The same regime that privatises culture leaves Indigenous knowledge unprotected, or worse, patentable by outsiders, from seeds to songs, a second enclosure of the commons. This work sits inside that contradiction. It runs on code, the most globalised colonial language, and it quotes the public domain, the small commons the law has not yet closed.
Take a screenshot, or press SNAP. The code collapses into a fractal image tinted to the paired region, over a starfield. Written into it is the pairing it came from: language, culture, coordinates, and the fragment being quoted at that instant, so the image carries what it was bound to.
read the full para-methodological framework
By default the cultural sounds are synthesized evocations. Any real recordings are inserted by the artist, who owns that decision and its weight; the work stages extraction, it does not absolve it. Quotations are public domain, drawn from freely shared archives; pairings are provisional.