The Entity
Sahej Rahal, "Anhad | The unscalable", 2023. Audio reactive AI simulation. Images courtesy: The Artist and JUNGE AKADEMIE, Akademie der Künste, Berlin.
The Entity
The rampancy of machinic intelligence bolstered by mega-corporations threatens to subsume the faculty of conscious experience. An image of a planet as computable clockwork is conjured that by extension transforms all that lies upon the earth into a standing stockpile of resources waiting to be plugged in and plundered for the machinic movements of global capital. Codified, categorized, and cut away from the whole.
Yet the very tools lulling us into inactive spectatorship hold unlikely trapdoors of escape. Seeking these exits, Sahej Rahal has started creating audio-reactive virtual worlds at the cross-section of game design and storytelling. These AI-populated worlds act as quasi-sentient musical instruments, for they generate a procedurally modulating music in response to the sonic chaos of the world—an infinitely incomputable song across the porous boundaries of the physical and the virtual.
During his EPFL residency, Rahal aims to create cybernetic playgrounds of cohabitation that can orchestrate a conversation between human and extra-human forms of intelligence—playgrounds consisting of AI-simulated worlds, but also physical counterparts of those worlds’ creatures rendered as drawings, diagrams, and sculptures.
Scientists and researchers working at the EPFL, as well as guest philosophers, will be invited into these playgrounds as investigative agents and join Rahal in conspiring around a speculative ontology of intelligence that will manifest in subversive acts of storytelling, secrecy, recollection, recitation, and rumor.
Sahej Rahal
Sahej Rahal, born in 1988 in Mumbai, is primarily a storyteller. He weaves together fact and fiction to create mythological worlds that unfold within the present. These myth-worlds take the shape of sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, and AI simulation programs in which indeterminate beings begin to emerge from the cracks between the real and the imagined. Rahal’s participation in group and solo exhibitions includes Manifesta 2022, the 2021 Gwangju Biennale, Liverpool Biennial, the Kochi Biennale, the Vancouver Biennale, the MACRO Museum Rome, Kadist SF, ACCA Melbourne, and CCA Glasgow. He has received the Cove Park/Henry Moore Fellowship, the Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship, and the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation Installation Art Grant, and won the Forbes India Art Award for best debut show for his solo exhibition Forerunner at Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai. Most recently he has been awarded the Digital Earth fellowship and the Junge Akademie Human Machine fellowship.