Everything is made from carbon: soil, your body, a computer. We've just chosen to forget the family resemblance.
Maps did something specific: they drew a line around land and said, this counts, this doesn't. The same instrument used to survey Dartmoor became the legal tool used to extract from it. Algorithms are doing the same job now, just faster.
That's what each piece below makes visible: one thread of that pattern, traced through a specific place, a specific fact, a specific question.
A wider, ongoing body of work lives at adahparris.art. These are the pieces that connect most directly to the work here.
Selected pieces
Before the Map
Before the Map: Ancestral Cosmologies, 1897 to Now
An 1897 star chart of the northern and southern sky, mapped through one framework only. I've pinned Indigenous LLMs onto it. Many already map onto ancestral cosmology.
In focus
Nine points — When an ancestral sky and a modern AI language model name the same place differently, which naming survives?
Oshumare arrived through a dream, not a survey. Every AI dataset has a blind spot shaped by its own methodology, a reality that lies beyond what an algorithm can scrape. What's missing from yours?
Available to acquire, or as the starting point for a commissioned piece in a similar vein, see /acquire.
L3b1a + D4b1a2: Original Instructions
L3b1a + D4b1a2: Original Instructions
A haplogroup is a small, unchanging marker in your DNA, passed down a single unbroken line for tens of thousands of years. This piece is a 1897 North Polar atlas page. Gold thread connects every leyline through the centre, through L3b1a and D4b1a2, two haplogroups separated by 60,000 years of divergence sharing one East African maternal ancestor. Haiti, Guyana, Congo, Sudan, Palestine, Iran, Bangladesh, Western Sahara: each sits on a real longitude line from this map's blank pole, chosen where that line crosses either my own DNA migration route, or a documented history of extraction.
In focus
Palestine — Levantine and Ashkenazi lineages share common ancestral haplogroups, yet territorial claims seldom make room for shared roots. Today, that same lineage and demographic data feeds the algorithms automated systems use to categorise, target, and displace people online. The technology changes, but the core function remains: does the sorting get any gentler, or just faster?
Iran — Underground water channels, built three thousand years ago, still carry water the way DNA carries lineage. Passed through, not sourced from one point. The sanctions are recent. Which one was built to last?
Available to acquire, or as the starting point for a commissioned piece in a similar vein, see /acquire.
Research in progress
Working title: 'The Middle East'
Middle to whom?
No image yet.
The Strait of Hormuz is a 33km-wide channel between Iran and Oman. Almost nothing about the modern world could function without it, and almost no one outside shipping and energy circles could point to it on a map. The strait carries a third of the world's fertilizer, a quarter of its oil, and the cables training its AI. Soil, DNA, and algorithm, converging on one stretch of water.
In focus
We're not in a technology crisis. We're in a listening crisis. What becomes possible when we remember that intelligences are entangled and animate?
Research in progress
Working title: 'Every algorithm is a proposition about intelligence'
Research in progress
No image yet. Working note.
If we treat silence as data, could deep listening be a metaphor for the creation of algorithms?
If the body is the sensor, what is being received, and by whom?
If an algorithm is a set of instructions for processing what comes in, is a deep listening practice also a set of instructions?
If both are pattern-attention practices, what is the difference between them?
In focus
Every algorithm is a proposition about what intelligence is. Deep listening is a proposition about what intelligence could be if we let it be relational.
Silence is not absence. What if refusal is a form of intelligence, not a gap in the data?
Feeding the Land, Sea, Sky session at Lessons in Listening 2026, Dartmoor. Part of the ongoing Cartography Is Not Home research.
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