The Rhizome of Babel is an interactive digital platform that re-examines the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel from an anti-imperialist and ecological perspective. Where the original story positions a unified language as that which enables humankind to breach into the heavens, this platform explores an alternative telling that sees in the tale evidence of human hubris and parallels to imperialist conquest and epistemicide (the destruction of indigenous knowledge systems and languages). Rather than punishment, the installation 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. Rather than a tower, what is aspired to here 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.
The platform will be produced in three stages: the creation of a micro platform to collect audio submissions, a co-creation workshop with participants, digital theorists and creative technologists during MozFest 2022, and finally the development of an interactive audio-visual environment built using Mozilla Hubs.