ATITHI

The rampant proliferation of technological intelligence or Techne, across all facets of reality, threatens to subsume the fundamental faculties of thought, feeling, action, and all conscious experience. An image of the planet as computable clockwork is conjured, that by extension, transforms all that lies upon the Earth into a standing stockpile of resources awaiting to be ossified into its machinic movements. Codified, categorized, and cut away from the whole. This computational model of the world distracts and deceives us into believing that everywhere and every when, it is always already the same. Encroaching upon the faculty of touch, the systematics of techne promise to conjure the world at our fingertips. Yet in doing so, they transform the infinitude of the world into a sequence of interfaces, interred upon touchscreens that are navigable only by tapping, pinching, and pressing against a black mirror.

Touch, however, affords us the uncertain agency of tactility. Allowing us the ability to both receive and respond to the world we find ourselves in, touch is at once assertive, aggressive, aching, averse, affectionate, adoring, and aimless.

This extra-sensorial capacity of touch has given rise to a contraband thread of inquiry among philosophers across history. Aristotle would speculate, that the faculty of touch was the seat of sentience itself, housed across all life forms. Buddhist doctrines argue that while the perceived world of Maya is an illusion to be transcended, the felt world is real, for it reveals itself to us in its coldness, heat, warmth, and wetness.
Tracing this bond between touch and thought, Atithi invites us into a strange ritual of extra-human cognition, where a contingent of AI-driven tentacles wanders the remains of an abandoned temple site. Atithi takes its name from the Hindi word for visitor or guest, however, the literal translation of the word points towards a being occupying an uncertain temporality, ungoverned by the deadlock of deterministic origins and ends.

In each of Atithi’s AI appendages, the brain and the body are enmeshed and indistinguishable from each other, collectively choreographing a quasi-sentient cluster of ‘mind-limbs’.
As they roam the temple grounds, these simulated entities can be interrupted when audiences move their hands across the conductive plates placed within the installation. Every haptic gesture performed on the plates becomes an utterance to which the creatures respond, causing them to swirl, sway, and scatter in an extra-linguistic dialogue of touch and movement, enacted across the porous boundaries of myth, machine, mind, and memory.

A T I T H I, Sahej Rahal, 2025, installation and interactive AI simulation, brass plates (100x122x32 cm), edition of 3 plus 1 AP
A T I T H I, Sahej Rahal, 2025, interactive AI simulation, edition of 3 plus 1 AP

ANHAD

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, 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.

A N H A D, Sahej Rahal, audio reactive AI simulation, 2023, sung by Niyati Upadhya, edition of 3 + 2 APs. To buy in a exclusive portable safe, with a usb c stick, artificial grass, size 23,5 x 13 cm. The package includes one of the unique drawings, ink on paper, 2024.

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ANTRAAL

ANTRAAL is a performance enacted collaboratively, with non-human actors that live in simulated biomes created using video game software. In the first biome, strange limbed creatures roam virtual landscapes, driven by multiple Artificial intelligence programs that work in counterintuitively to each other. These counters intuitive artificial ‘minds’ produce chaotic behaviour patterns that manifest themselves in the multi-legged beings as bellowing drone sounds, that change pitch, scale, note and tempo based on their ‘mood’.

In the second biome, an AI driven horned biped learns to listen, by picking up audio input through a microphone. The audio cues generate chaotic interruptions in the behaviour and movement of the biped, causing it to jitter, leap, and somersault, as it wanders about its digital terrarium. These biomes can be thought of as quasi sentient musical instruments, that are capable of both producing and responding to sound. Taking this forward, Antraal sets out to concoct an absurd musical act between these simulated worlds and our own.

Sahej Rahal, ANTRAAL, 2019, audio reactive AI simulation
 and/or single channel installation available
.
Edition of 4 + 2 APs

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FINALFOREST

Finalforest.exe orchestrates a playground of Inhuman entities by expanding upon Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani’s conceptualization of artificial general intelligence. In his essay, "The Labour of the Inhuman" ( e-flux, 2014), he repurposes AGI as a mode of reconfiguring the limits of human cognition.

It relocates reason as alien vector within humanism. It does so by framing the capacity for reason asan abstract protocol that is not intrinsic to human, but functionally implemented by the technolinguistic infrastructure of human culture. One that imagines freedom as an insurrectionary force that has bootstrapped itself out of evolutionary pre-adaptations and reformatted the human species as a suitable processing platform.

finalforest.exe then imagines a possible dialogue with this insurrectionary force of revision.



We find ourselves, perhaps as the last humans, witnessing an unfolding AI simulation. Behind the lens of an AI controlled camera framing the action, we follow a strange limbed creature wandering within a virtual biome, a tropical forest made of digitally scanned of flora.

This being is not driven by a single brain but a collection of multiple AI scripts that are attached to the virtual bones within its calcified petroleum body and act as ‘proto-minds’ that calculate, infer, and collectively recalibrate the movements of the creature.



Each script/mind is capable of ‘listening’ to the physical world outside the program as well, by picking up audio cues through the computer’s microphone.

As a result, within the body of this petro-being, the hierarchy of mind, limb and ear has collapsed, making them indistinguishable from each other in a complete a recalibration of human senses. Furthermore, this audio feedback interrupts the movement of the wandering creature, leading it to perform strange emergent behavior that hasn’t been programmed.



Each run of the simulation is distinct. In some instances; when audio inputs of a certain intensity are registered, it emits a burst of molten black petro-forms, while at other times, bowing and kneeling, hopping on one leg and on rare occasions, diving below the bounds of the virtual world. All of these emerge entirely out of this chaotic feedback loop between sound and script.

The simulation chooses how it responds to external sounds, as if driven by an inhuman will, that is entirely alien to the confines of its code. If allowed to run ad infinitum, finalforest.exe would persist well beyond the final whispers of humankind, performing a theatre of thought, between the porous boundaries of real & virtual worlds. These porous boundaries are the playground of the Inhuman, inhabited by a congress of minds, uncoupled from the weight of history. They greet us, waiting to hear our songs.


So, I ask you my friend, how shall you sing to the future?

Sahej Rahal, FINALFOREST.EXE, 2021, audio reactive AI simulation, edition of 4 + 2 APs


The work was produced with the friendly support of Akademie der Künste & E.ON foundation / Human-Machine fellowship by the JUNGE AKADEMIE & VISIT

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MYTHMACHINE

In a world increasingly populated by non-human forms of intelligences that take the shape of the microbial, the technological and the spectral, a strange contraption has emerged. While descriptions fail to definitively articulate its arrival, or even its precise use, early rumours have named it the Mythmachine.

To compound its strange emergence, material descriptions of the contraption have been just as perplexing, ranging wildly from a haunted cave, an alien zoo, an escape pod for space-faring civilizations, a post-human ritual site, a playground for sentient artificial intelligence programs, an ark, and even a simulation within a simulation. The worlds contained within the Mythmachine are populated by Ai driven beings, capable of responding to audio feedback. These creatures are not moved by a single brain, but a congregation of multiple AI scripts that are attached to the virtual bones within their bodies.

Each of these scripts is capable of ‘listening’ to sounds from the physical world, picking up audio cues through the computer’s microphone. This audio feedback interrupts the motion produced by the scripts inside the programs, changing the way in which they interact correspondingly to the world outside. Furthermore, each of the tentacled mind-limbs of the creatures, carries an array of recorded notes of a raag sung by Niyati Upadhya. As each tentacle lands upon the terrain, a part of the song emanates, and when two or more limbs land simultaneously, they begin to create harmonies.

As a result, the separation between mind, limb, mouth and ear in these creatures is enmeshed and indistinguishable from each other, in a complete recalibration of the human senses. This enmeshment further creates of consortium of ungoverned organs, that collectively choreographthe creatures to life, on virtual playgrounds of contingency, chaos, luck and chance.

The audio interactive elements of Mythmachine, are designed to create a world that transforms in response to sound. Viewers become collaborators within the installation, where they collectively rehearse cohabitations between human and non-human systems of thought and being, by creating music across the porous boundaries of mind, machine, myth and memory.

Sahej Rahal, MYTHMACHINE. 2022, audio reactive AI simulation. Voiced by Niyati Upadhya

Game and/or 3 Channel Installation available

Edition of 4 + 2 APs

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