Organic-Mechanical Hybrids, Digital Economies, Colonial

Legacies, and Collective Futures

It all starts with the soil, from where echoes of human labor arise. From there, they reach out to us, glowing, spark-

ling, flashing. Evaporating golden mist forming clouds in the sky—to augment our bodies and minds. To inspire us. To

haunt us. Always watching silently. But the soil never forgets. Toiling, sweating, a choreography of hands, eyes, ner-

ves, and imaginations keeps the system alive. Their chorus reflects back to us and shatters the illusion. Language of

the Soil moves through these undercommons of digital production in recognition of its intelligence, its rhythms, and its

refusals. Developed by Anna Ehrenstein together with researchers, designers, and digital workers who—loudly, politi-

cally, and on their own terms— train Large Language Models, deceptively labelled as ‘Artificial’ Intelligence, the pro-

ject traces how people organize, narrate, and imagine from inside infrastructures built to mute them.

Weaving together a sculptural and cinematic installation, digital labor, and Science and Technology Studies, this spe-

culative work cycle draws on multi-faceted and pluridisciplinary research based on fieldwork in Nairobi, Kenya and

Cairo, Egypt. Moving through a mythological hybrid landscape blending organic and mechanical parts, interviews,

workshops, and collective storytelling are condensed to create a speculative 360° video narrative. The project fea-

tures contributions by co-collaborators Ariana Dongus, Fasica Berhane, Mophat Okinyi, Richard Mathenge, Dalton

Odiyo, Zana Hoxha, and Ibrahim Ahmed, crafting together futuristic set design and costumes, 3D-printed and hand

painted sculptural works and photographic assemblages.

The work cycle is animated by the social and environmental contradictions of a world increasingly shaped by AI, auto-

mation, and platform economies. The lived reality of platform workers—particularly in the Global South—often re-

mains obscured. Women and displaced populations are disproportionately exposed, as platform labor intersects with

unpaid reproductive work, legal precarity, and historically gendered regimes of extraction. The daily expenditure of di-

gital labor in Nairobi, a major site for outsourcing content moderation and AI data annotation, exemplifies how histori-

cal patterns of colonial extraction and control persist within the structures of the digital economy. Various international

companies engage Kenyan outsourcing firms for AI training and content moderation, paying wages lower than $2 per

hour, as a 2023 investigation found. Recently, Chinese companies have entered the market, as well. While for some,

machines become extensions of their senses, others become extensions of the machines.

“I clicked until my eyes bled, I labelled until I forgot my name.”

Language Of The Soil looks at the manual labour of AI and the wisdom of the soil.