Sahej Rahal – Digital AI Artist

“Sahej Rahal’s works aim to construct new narratives – even new worlds. His latest work Juggernaut – a video game populated by AI controlled objects and a consistent continuation of his first video game Dissonant Mythologies – is an attempt to bring his Walker sculptures to life. Borrowing the philosophical term »apperception,« Sahej Rahal testifies playfully the process by which the experience of the objects triggered by impulses like movement and sound assimilates and transforms a future experience. The nonplayable characters in Juggernaut enter a continuous loop of learning cycles. What if these objects begin to think one day? What if the objects of this fictional virtual world make a passage into the real world? Here he speaks about the development of Juggernaut and how this game is another way of sculpting the world.” – The Other Sculptor 2019

In his two-part essay »The Labor of the Inhuman,« philosopher Reza Negarestani writes:

“Inhumanism is the extended practical elaboration of humanism; it is born out of a diligent commitment to the project of enlightened humanism. As a universal wave that erases the self-portrait of man drawn in sand, inhumanism is a vector of revision. It relentlessly revises what it means to be human by removing its supposed evident characteristics and preserving certain invariances. At the same time, inhumanism registers itself as a demand for construction, to define what it means to be human by treating human as a constructible hypothesis, a space of navigation and intervention.”

Origional Article: https://schloss-post.com/the-other-sculptor/

What I find so impressive and what drew me into Rahal’s work is how alive his ‘Walker’ sculpture seems to be. How the AI makes it seem like a real creature and how through his video game you can follow it and interact with it as it goes about its ‘life’. It brings a sense of reason and vitality to a digitally created landscape that makes them seem like participants as much as the player. The way they walk is inconsistent but natural like a spider and the directions they choose to go in aren’t random at all but create a path which best gets them to where they are going.