Which song will we sing to the future? How will the future listen to the present? What would the conversation be like between humans and post-human beings? These are some of the questions that have occupied Mumbai-based artist Sahej Rahal as he has worked with Artificial Intelligence (AI) programmes to create art, the aim of this collaboration being to collectively imagine better worlds. Rahal, a long-time fan of sci-fi films, who graduated from the Rachana Sansad Academy of Fine Art, Mumbai, and is one of the fellows of Digital Earth’s 2020-2021 fellowship, creates fictional, mythological worlds which take the shape of sculptures, performances, films, comics and paintings. What led him to AI programmes, he says, was the question:  what would happen if the creatures that he was creating had an active role in the narrative.

“Imagine that there’s this multiple-limbed creature and each of its limbs has a script attached to it,” Rahal explains. “These scripts are capable of listening to sounds from the computer’s microphone and that audio feedback interrupts the motion of these creatures.” Rahal invited Hindustani classical singer friends to sing to the programmes, and says that the creatures responded differently to the music, appearing once to bow down to each other to an abstract rendition of the raga Bhairavi. “The interaction that is produced is randomised and changes each time with new inputs. So essentially, what you have are a set of virtual worlds that are capable of listening to our world.”