Anhad is an interactive AI simulation where cybernetic chimeras confront the limits of the human scale with the infinitude of song. On first approach, viewers encounter an AI controlled creature wandering a digital forest. The AI driven limbs of this tripedal being, carry recorded notes of Hindustani music, that emanate as the it navigates around the virtual flora.

Audio feedback from the external world interrupts the creature, changing its movements and consequentially modulating its music. This continuous interplay of sound between the physical and virtual worlds, allows Anhad to generate an infinitely modulating song.

The age of upheaval is upon us. We are witnessing the return of natural history. Biology has once again taken centre stage. Spectral viruses wreak havoc turning very air we breathe hostile, while typhoons and hurricanes become a monthly affair. On the other hand, the AI augmented nexus of corporations and nation-states march us into authoritarian singularities premised upon half-baked ideas of civilisational purity.

The rampancy of techno-feudalism threatens to subsume all faculties of conscious experience. An image of a planet as computable clockwork is regurgitated, transforming all that lies upon it, into a standing stockpile of resources waiting to be plugged in and plundered into the machinic movements of global capital. The human subject is now defined by a series of exclusions. Codified, categorized, and cut away from all that exists beyond itself.

These separations reach their apex in the form of artificial intelligence, producing a version of the mind, mutated beneath the detritus of the digital. Overwhelmed by planetary scale obfuscations, of boredom, banality and bad faith that distract and deceive us into believing that both every day and everywhere is always all the same. Yet the very tools lulling us into inactive spectatorship, Yet the very tools lulling us into inactive spectatorship, hold unlikely trapdoors of escape.

हद-हद करते सब गए. बेहद गयो न कोए. अनहद के मैदान में रहा कबीरा सोए

Limits are all they speak of, and yet they dare not cross them, I wait for you on playground beyond those limits. – Kabir Das, 15th century poet & mystic.

Kabir, in this short rhyme, unravels the exclusionary limits of the world measured against the human scale, by reconfiguring it into a playground of radical cohabitation. Drawing upon its namesake, the AI simulation Anhad, reconfigures the same algorithmic tools of exclusion, to create music.
As the biomes of Anhad are collectively animated by human and non-human actants, the image of the planet rendered to the scale of man transforms into a vessel of cohabitation, as imagined by Ursula K. Le Guin, in her landmark essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.

For the playground of Anhad is premised on the principle of the pharmakon, the notion that the cure lies within the poison itself. The excesses of oppression that pilfer through technology today, predicate themselves in the first instance upon an act of distancing that is endemic to the categorical imperative of language itself. Put simply, in order to enact the violence of othering, man must first separate himself from the world by naming it plant, animal, ghost, immigrant and outsider, in a series of segregations.

The cybernetic song of Anhad however, seeks to circumvent these linguistic separations by binding them in a continuum of music, that emanates in chorus across myth, machine, mind, and memory.