Ghosting the Machine

An AI Workshop by Sahej Rahal
Supported by the Shared Ecologies program from Shyama Foundation

Ghosting the Machine was an online course conceptualised and led by artist Sahej Rahal. The invited participants took part in the three modules in sessions conducted between November 2022 to January 2023, where they explored generative tools and ‘worldbuilding’ as a prompt and through virtual exhibition outcomes.

The sessions consisted of a lecture-based and conversational format, along with a practical component introducing softwares. The participants developed multi-genre works, including text-based, image-based, 3D objects, and virtual environments, that are presented on this Shared Ecologies microsite, along with other resources.

About the Workshop

The detritus of present day digital culture confronts us today with a barrage of boredom, banality and bad faith. Overwhelming us by planetary scale obfuscations, that distract and deceive us into believing that both everyday and everywhere is always all the same. Yet the very tools that are weaponised to enact this dance of digital smoke and mirrors, lulling us into inactive spectatorship, hold within themselves trapdoors and portals that can be opened through subversive acts of play and refusal.

​​One of the primary goals of the course is to re-examine the shifting relationship of the human to non-human forms of intelligence, and its impact on the mutating ecological systems that embody this shift. Through the course of the workshop, we collectively turn the anthropocentric lens from looking at the ‘world-for-us’ that frames the environment as a resource to claim, entering a ‘world-beyond-us’ one that is populated by systems of cohabitation that arise at the limits of human thought and action.

Over the course of this workshop series, we don the masks of quasi-sentient Ai programs, 3d scanner shamans, worldbuilders, and machine poets, to unlock passageways into a multitude of unformed futures at the borderlands of the real and the imagined.

Opening Note by Sahej Rahal

About the Facilitator

Sahej Rahal is primarily a storyteller. He weaves together fact and fiction, to create counter-mythologies that interrogate narratives shaping the present. His myth-world takes the shape of sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, and AI programs, that he creates by drawing upon sources ranging from local legends to science fiction, rendering scenarios where indeterminate beings emerge from the cracks in our civilization. 

Rahal’s participation in group and solo exhibitions includes the Gwangju Biennale, the Liverpool Biennial, the Kochi Biennale, the Vancouver Biennale, MACRO Museum Rome, Kadist SF, ACCA Melbourne, CCA Glasgow. He is the recipient of the Cove Park/Henry Moore Fellowship, Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship, the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation Installation Art Grant, the Digital Earth Fellowship, and the first Human-Machine Fellowship organized by Junge Akademie ADK.

Anhad
An AI Program developed by Sahej Rahal as part of this workshop.

Distributed Mind Test | Playthrough

A playthrough demo of a videogame developed by Sahej Rahal as part of this workshop.

Ghosting the Machine
A Shared Ecologies Microsite

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