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Meghan:
How is this exploration manifesting in your project, Rhizome of Babel?
How is this exploration manifesting in your project, Rhizome of Babel?
Kosisochukwu:
I’m really excited about Rhizome of Babel as a project that allows me to take a lot of these questions and ideas and apply them in a way that takes me further out of my comfort zone, both in terms of medium and themes. I’m grateful for Mozilla—the parent company for Firefox—for reaching out to me to be part of the annual digital festival, MozFest, and giving me the opportunity and time to further flesh out my initial idea/contribution to the festival.
As it stands, Rhizome of Babel is an interactive digital project that I am creating with the help of Lucas LaRochelle, a brilliant Montreal-based multidisciplinary designer and researcher, that re-examines the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel from an anti-imperialist and ecological perspective. The project sees in the original story’s valorization of a unified language evidence of imperialist conquest and epistemicide—the destruction of indigenous knowledge systems and languages. The final product will be an interactive audio-visual environment that envisions the abundance and diversity of human languages—an ecosystem in its own right—as an alternative vision of prosperity that privileges biodiversity over monoculture, opacity over transparency, relationality over hierarchy.
Instead of a tower, the project aspires to be a rhizomatic network that stretches and expands sideways
Instead of a tower, what the project aspires to is a rhizomatic network that stretches and expands sideways, that embraces and respects incommensurability, that asks that we develop new ways of understanding one another. Equally exciting for me is that the project will engage with ideas around biomimicry and nature-based innovation, as a way of reconceptualizing how we conceive of and understand language.
I’m really excited about Rhizome of Babel as a project that allows me to take a lot of these questions and ideas and apply them in a way that takes me further out of my comfort zone, both in terms of medium and themes. I’m grateful for Mozilla—the parent company for Firefox—for reaching out to me to be part of the annual digital festival, MozFest, and giving me the opportunity and time to further flesh out my initial idea/contribution to the festival.
As it stands, Rhizome of Babel is an interactive digital project that I am creating with the help of Lucas LaRochelle, a brilliant Montreal-based multidisciplinary designer and researcher, that re-examines the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel from an anti-imperialist and ecological perspective. The project sees in the original story’s valorization of a unified language evidence of imperialist conquest and epistemicide—the destruction of indigenous knowledge systems and languages. The final product will be an interactive audio-visual environment that envisions the abundance and diversity of human languages—an ecosystem in its own right—as an alternative vision of prosperity that privileges biodiversity over monoculture, opacity over transparency, relationality over hierarchy.
Instead of a tower, the project aspires to be a rhizomatic network that stretches and expands sideways
Instead of a tower, what the project aspires to is a rhizomatic network that stretches and expands sideways, that embraces and respects incommensurability, that asks that we develop new ways of understanding one another. Equally exciting for me is that the project will engage with ideas around biomimicry and nature-based innovation, as a way of reconceptualizing how we conceive of and understand language.