On the Origin of Silence

On the Origin of Silence is a hybrid, interactive augmented reality (AR) installation that critically reinterprets historically banned books from the Western canon. Utilizing a bespoke AR application, viewers engage with visual markers that obscure the original text through blackout poetry as well as activating satirical animations that provide contextual framing to more controversial literatures. These augmented interventions function as acts of aesthetic and ideological subversion, reframing censored content through irony, lyricism, and resistance. Blending poetry, XR, and parodic imagery, the work interrogates how meaning is constructed, and who gets to censor it. Audiences are invited to look not just at the recovery of redacted texts, but at the technologies of silencing across time, morphing from imperialist revisionism to institutional gatekeeping, religious moralism to algorithmic surveillance, and invasive colonial presence to the subtle traps of lawless digital forums. The structure of the installation, called Matra Meru, references the ancient Sanskrit term for what is now known as Fibonacci numbers. Long predating Eurocentric knowledge systems, it was within Sanskrit prosodic conventions that 3rd-century BCE poet-mathematicians studied binary logic and combinatorics—learned from verse rather than laboratories.  In uniting erased literature & decolonised knowledge with vandalistic verse and confrontational discourse, On the Origin of Silence becomes a site of convergence, where new media fuses and celebrates the oldest technology in the world: language.