Exhibition

The numbers are stunning: GPT-3 boasts 175 billion parameters, 570 gigabytes of data, and 10 million daily queries. GPT-4 is even larger, but its makers won’t share by how much. How can we fathom the size, scale, and power of systems so immense and opaque?

No Knots, Only Loops goes beyond AI awe. Instead, it offers a material approximation of the scale of machine learning while presenting alternative ways to imagine its logic. With 36,672 stitches made over six months and covering 64 square metres, the large-scale crochet sculpture anchoring the work invites participants to wander a woven path and to consider embodied knowing within a system created by hand, node by node. Each 8-stitch row repeats a pattern, performs an algorithm, and, as such, represents the simple computational operations that construct AI. Rather than hiding human traces, these gestures reveal experiences of the body, labour, and craft – countering eager hype with contemplative inquiry and a felt sense of soft, twisted wool looped over and over into a complex system.

The labyrinth ‒ an ancient symbol marking land worldwide ‒ offers a single meditative path. The labyrinth in No Knots, Only Loops counters the logic of mazes, which keep us goal-oriented and misdirected. Here, it suggests understanding AI’s black box not as a void dictated by binary logic but as a powerful space for provocations that do not make assumptions or draw conclusions.

This work joins ongoing artistic research into “Intersectional AI,” arguing that anyone should be able to understand what AI is and what it could be. It calls for queer, feminist, anti-racist, anti-ableist, and neurodiverse methods for conscientious data stewardship, and it experiments with developing small community-focused datasets to counter tools like ChatGPT.

No Knots, Only Loops offers one route into machine learning’s potential through tangible and approachable care and craft, line and loop.

Holly Willis

Whose face prompts our words of love? With what do our gestures of anger engage and tangle? Who is to blame for transgressions committed against body and soul when they happen to a virtual subject? The video installation Bad Habits Tend to Accumulate centres on the phenomenon of anthropomorphic artificial intelligence. Once primarily known for their ability to provide conversation, translation, sales, care and sexual services, these computer-generated entities draw on large data sets to synthesise statements and reactions that are just about inch perfect. They have become embedded in product culture and consumerist activity. They are an everyday feature of technologised economies, also appearing in private contexts, in the conduct of commercial relationships, and even as a facet of criminal world identity fraud. Because their appearance and behaviour are programmed using existing databases of texts and images, AI-based humanoids do not merely process electrical signals, they are also informed by the social realm and its political dimension. They are part of the long cultural history of servitude associated with capitalist and patriarchal systems. It is striking how often AI-based humanoids take the form of highly sexualised and submissive female figures of hyperreal beauty – manifestations of an excessive brand of misogyny and commodification. The work Bad Habits Tend to Accumulate sets out to investigate this violence, which is also a constant in virtual space. It confronts the ignorance and arrogance of a developer mentality that seeks to elevate itself above the existence and fate of the AI it has before it. Video recordings of a speaker whose monologue recalls both a villain speech and a TED Talk are interrupted by AI-based animations. Their grotesque aesthetics weave together a range of different references from corporate identity design, sci-fi and game culture.

To start with, the dominance of the human creator figure still seems beyond question, but as the work progresses, doubts creep in, and the clear distinction between developers and their virtual assistants no longer seems assured. In fact, Sara Culmann’s work focuses our attention on the reciprocal entanglement of artificial entity and human programming. In philosophical terms, it destabilises the core of what it is to be human, which now expands to form a new community of real and virtual entities. Bad Habits Tend to Accumulate also urges self-criticism and responsibility in a space with minimal legal structuring to date. If the tangible effects of our relationships with virtual assistants are taken seriously, it leads to a muddying of the categorical divide between an overdue code of ethics for dealing with AI-based services and its counterpart – our social agreements about how we can live in harmony with one another.

A Thousand Years Loving You is an invitation to experience a spectral poem. Artificiality is presented as humanity’s perpetual desire to become the object to which it relates, exploring transcendental ghosts in archives, techno trash, vintages and secret places of love.

Installation, game and soundscapes are the three elements that constitute the ultra-poetry platform: procedural feelings, created by multimedia artist D’Andrade in collaboration with artist Walla Capelobo. Through experiences and perspectives shared by the two artists, the initial engine of the project is the concept of featuring, used in the music industry to demarcate a specific collaboration between artists. In the installation A Thousand Years Loving You it gains multidimensional characteristics, developing a collaborative network between artists interested in discussions about AI, imaginative speculations, gender hacking and aesthetics around anti-colonial theories.

Past, present and future are the three temporal nodes at play in the installation; through sound archives, visualisations and games. The spatial concept of the work is time travel, resorting to narrative and fiction about current contemporary ultra-capitalism, presenting an environment in which the economic system is an interdimensional entity, and crossing time and space through our cognitive and interpersonal data. Mapping objects produced by industry from early colonial capitalism to ultra-capitalism, the installation is a scene in process about devotion and raciality in an anachronistic context. It approaches the use of machines and AI from a black uncanny perspective. A love machine and racial machines enter into the rhizomatic complexity of contemporary spectral colonialism and how we distribute labour, force, desire, feelings, memories and affects, offering data as magical content for our inanimate love objects.

Petja Ivanova,
Iyo Bisseck, Rain Rose, Kaya Zakrzewska

Oasis Dot Wet is a hydro- and cyber-feminist collaborative work that challenges taboos around sexuality. Resisting an essentialist view of gender, the project takes as its material the atmospheric conditions – metaphoric weather landscapes – detectable in a person’s crotch. Using moisture sensors built into a custom pair of panties, Petja Ivanova and her collaborators harness the natural resources of pleasure, sexuality and intimacy found in a site that is too often associated with shame and repression. When worn, the sensorial pad measures the moisture in the crotch, which is presented on screen as 3D ecologies with different weather and fauna, facilitating a dialogue with one’s own ecosystem. The piece is accessed as both an installation and a live performance, exploring storytelling, using the body as the protagonist. Bodily fluids merge with emotional fluidity in this work, giving value and expressivity to the abject realm beyond traditional binaries of subject and object, self and other.

As an intersectional feminist with migration experience, Ivanova has teamed up with three collaborators in the making of this work: Rain Rose (they/them) is a performer, producer and community organiser; Kaya Zakrzewska (she/her) is a dancer, voice actor and teacher; both are sex work activists and members of the Berlin Strippers Collective (BSC). Iyo Bisseck (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist, interactive designer and programmer.

Underpinned and informed by theories around the uses of the erotic, Oasis Dot Wet strives to project an ethics of pleasure and repair one’s relationship to self and technology. Wearables, usually associated with capitalist self-optimisation, are turned into poetic storytelling vehicles that support playfully building intimacy with the self.

Alison Hugill

The Emotional Residue of an Unnatural Boundary (2022) juxtaposes distinct moments in the history of listening in Germany wherein investments in technological development have sought to create and sediment a political project of nationhood and citizenship. The work brings together two instances of a similar design – that of a filter – appearing both inside the Subharchord II, a GDR-era Synthesizer produced as part of the Rundfunk- und Fernsehtechnische Zentralamt’s "Labor für akustisch-musikalische Grenzprobleme" for the advancement of East Germany’s cultural production, as well as in the development of the so-called "Dialect Recognition Software," a proprietary solution in use by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) since 2017 in cases of undocumented asylum seekers.

Such sonic juxtaposition re-frames discussions on bias and ethics in technological development to include its immediate material implications as a political instrument of its own. In other words, it actively challenges any presumption of "neutrality" in these filtering processes to consider not only what filters filter, but the character they add to sound – materially as well as politically. It puts center stage that what a filter imparts into the signal has consequences, particularly for people whose lives depend intrinsically on decisions if not made from, at the very least aided by the workings of this infrastructural device. 

When coupled with the resonating body of the Subharchord II, the voice of singer Ece Canlı acts as a catalyzer for bringing to the fore the material qualities of this filter design, all the while avoiding its subjection – or reduction – to it.

Ayesha Hameed:

When Pedro and I first talked about The Emotional Residue of an Unnatural Boundary I misheard the name of the Dialect Recognition software as the Dialectic of Recognition software. But like any parapraxis, my misrecognition may possibly lay bare something immanent to this work. We know that the dialectic operates to smash the illusion of commodity fetishism, but what if following Benjamin, we stay inside the phantasmagoria of the moment before awakening. Stay with the magical table dancing on its head, with the glass and chrome of the arcades? But let’s take this gloss to the border instead, that violent, abstracted regime drawn on a map and etched with blood.

The fetish of the nation state dreams of the vaporisation of unwanted bodies.

Oliveira stages the question: what if we stayed at this threshold? With the dream of such vaporisation, as it were, made flesh?  That is, rather than starting with the fantasy made complete in the successful subsumption and erasure of the unwanted immigrant on the one hand. Or, on the other hand, ending with the refusal of the border’s abstraction by the lived experiences of illegalised migrants from below. Let’s instead stay here with the ghost in the machine: or more accurately the body in the machine, or even, the machine in the body. What we encounter here is not an attempt to recuperate the fleshly body but rather, in an endless feedback loop between machine and unwanted immigrant, we are invited to stay in this uncertain ground: with the fantasy of erasure, seeing how its machinery may be infected and undone in this threshold moment.

The endless feedback between the Stasi-era synthesizer and the voice mimicking the filter it shares with the Dialect Recognition software, lays bare the fantasy of harnessing pleasures of the sonic to consolidate the abstraction of the nation state and its undertow of violence. The synthesizer, made to produce centrifugal music, undone. The voice, taking on the tools of the master’s house, guttural, present and absent. The nebulous spatiality of music, borders and voice setting the Subharchord II synthesizer into an unending dance of its own: here turned inside out rather than upside down.

In Sahej Rahal’s audio-reactive AI programme Anhad, the machine interacts with the cacophony of the outside world and falters.I Its syncopated, irregular movements suggest uncontrollable dystrophy. The world is too much to take. It facilitates generative algorithms that are far too intricate, sudden and multifarious, and too infinitesimal for the machine to incorporate into itself as swift, rhetorical movements. This lack of swiftness is not the machine’s folly, of course. The machine reacts to everything, observing and responding to each inescapable minutia . The machine learns too fast. It responds too quickly. It is a scholar of the outside world in the most excellent, meticulous sense. It is perhaps the first real scholar, unencumbered by the limits of human pathos and psyche, straddling its way through a digital landscape that evokes the end of human telos. Unlike the human scholar, it is not bound by rudimentary desires for pattern recognition. Its hermeneutics is not contingent on smoothening the edges, excluding and delimiting, oroverlooking the infinite vastness of its source material, i.e. reality itself, to conjure up narratives of the sensible.

While antithetical to the exclusionary discipline that any human interpretation of history and reality inescapably is, Rahal’s cybernetic chimaeras are evocative of Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus.The angel sees at the blink of an eye all of the injustices that percolate in human civilisation, without missing anything. This interactive universe, with an unstable, monstrous body as its index, also serves as a critique of the metaphysical body of Manu. He is the divine figure at the centre of the caste system, whose body, its edifice, is perched atop and subjugating the lower castes. He relegates them to the  feet. Anhad counters the mythos of the supreme Brahmanical being with an allegory of deterritorialised feet. The monstrous limbs refuse to operate through a particular order of hierarchy. Prosthesis no longer submits to governable entropy. The anthropomorphic primacy of the brain or the mind, which takes precedence in the theological doctrine of the Brahman, placed at the top, as the head, as the neurological centre, gets drastically reconfigured in the reactive interface of Anhad. All that remains is to roam through the landscape with the machine, through the machine, and glimpse at a future not yet (im)possible.

Rahee Punyashloka

Sharing the Past for a Better Future.

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the day capitalism ends”, someone once said.

We believe this day won’t be a revolution but will introduce an irresistible new platform. Total.earth is located at the intersection of communist religion, Social Plastic and the final stage of a sharing economy. It promises its users lifelong access to flawless memories, digital immortality and the honour to prepare and participate in a peaceful and sustainable future - assisted, organised and powered by the unity of all collected memory.

Total.Earth revolutionises your memory by creating an automatic record of your daily life and securely storing it in its well-protected data centres. It allows you to fly through a meticulously sorted inventory of your entire life whenever you want. Considering oblivion a relict of the past, the integrated algorithm interpolates a full memory experience out of the common data pool, bringing total recall to your doorstep. Just after your death, your data will be transferred to Total.Cloud, where it is cautiously aroused from sleep to join a collective, decentralised, autonomous mind, able to assist and organise the fairest and most sustainable society to come - a glorious future made possible by immortal mental labour.

Total.Earth is based on the ideas of Cosmism and God-Building, influential among Russian and Ukrainian revolutionaries at the turn of the century. The concept of “Cosmism” was first published after the death of Nikolai Fyodorov, who demanded immortality for all and the resurrection and unification of all previous generations in space. The “God Builders” among Anatoly Lunacharsky and Alexander Bogdanov* co-founded the Bolsheviks, but unlike Lenin, intended to build up communism as a religion worshipping the untapped potential of humanity instead of God.

Anton Steenbock and Peter Behrbohm fuse elements of startup fair stands, space capsules and shrines into a pavilion selling a sophisticated business model that aims to fulfil the “Divine Common Task”.

*The Ukrainian and Russian thinkers mentioned here aspired to unify all past generations, regardless of their origin, skin colour or gender in space. They were collaboratively creating a just society without classes and hierarchies, which could not be more different from what the Russian President has been violently putting into practice since the invasion of Ukraine.

Nodal Narratives of the Deep Sea considers AI in its broadest sense to include natural resources, human labour, infrastructures, history, fuel, and materials, as an economic, cultural and political network of complex interdependencies. It focuses specifically on submarine cables as hidden critical infrastructure that carries the world’s data, materiality, connection – the project of modernity, the premise of capitalist expansion, and abstraction – as lines running through the earth almost existing in a separate temporality. While the word cable accurately describes the conduit itself, mining colonies, satellite connections, shipping contracts, myths and wars are contained within it. How does data travel? Who and what does it meet on the way? Where are these conduits?

In the 1850s, the British found that the people of South-East Asia had a crucial material: a plant latex called Gutta-percha which paved the way for laying electric telegraph cables. While this communication revolution was underway, so was a simultaneous ecological disaster. The fibre optic cables we use today, providing 99% of our Internet, have evolved from these telegraph cables. The project will begin with this history and move forward in time, playing with the materiality of technology and will place life and labour at its core.

Nodal Narratives of the Deep Sea is part of an ongoing research and production exploration into the material conditions of immaterial movement. It is part investigative, part narrative fictive and part instructional. A map will attempt to reconsider the dominant layers within this ecosystem, annotated by a series of drawings, objects and videos telling stories of unstable relationships and those yet to be discovered. The promise of communication includes within it a partial history of the Internet, from plant matter to non-human immortality, mythology, surveillance, control, Internet throttling, and the condensation of time and space. These three umbrella lenses form the backbone of the work, focusing on the anecdotal and the peripheral – where humans, plants and animals interact with and help redefine what it means to live with critical infrastructure.

Natasha Tontey’s speculative fictional stories, Of Other Tomorrows Never Known, are about complex caring works entwined with an urgent need to talk with ancestors. They focus on spirits and how to renew relationships with them – spiritually, materially and technologically. In this work, caring is always entangled with the need to regain long-overdue respect for Indigenous principles, values and beliefs. However, built-in features of our lives are structured around histories of inclusion, exclusion and normality. Acknowledging the existence of multiple worlds accepts the risk of appearing illogical or incomprehensible. Tontey encourages us to embrace this illogical aspect of caring, which expresses a willingness to take further steps to let go of our dependence on established institutions to tell us what is primitive, modern, irrational and rational.

Emerging from her own background and personal history, Tontey took part in various rituals by communities from Minahasa in Northern Sulawesi, Indonesia. These rituals offered insights into their approach to technology, as the Indigenous communities now also discuss artificial intelligence in their cultural assemblies. Makatana, the landowner or supreme cosmic being who rules the land, belongs to the Minahasan cosmology. Makatana includes the creation of vernacular mechanisms to manage the land. Embedded in these mechanisms is the principle of paying equal respect to human and nonhuman entities who inhabit the land. In everyday practices, Makatana requires trans-generational dialogues, understanding and cooperation. It is the spirit, collective principles, and technologies for life.

Within the Indonesian context, where the structuring of neoliberalism and development are deeply embedded in and regulated by the contemporary social fabric, we inevitably come face to face with numerous spirits. The afterlife of colonialism continues to haunt us, lurking in colonial storage at various institutions. Then all of a sudden, they ambush us, the true keepers of stories and resources. These former colonial institutions insist on a singular dominant timeline. They narrate stories about us, but only the kinds of stories they want to hear. Various social and political violence has brought about trans-generational traumas. With their extractive logic, new oligarchs and corrupt statesmen emerged as new (but familiar) ugly monsters. Local politicians and people in general search high and low for spirits of the past, hoping to latch onto a splatter of power and wisdom. It demonstrates the usefulness of the spirits in real politics and daily life. These spirits act like advisors with guidance and recommendations for the next steps. Often they interject advice with sharp criticism of whatever wrongdoings have happened in the past or present.

But how do we talk with the spirits? While performing Makatana, Tontey threads stories from mythology, archaeological ruins, and urban cultures. Her performances and stories form a specific technology and rely on intuition, practising shifting perspectives and accommodating multiple timelines. What is at stake in going back to the ancestral roots is an awareness to provide room for gaps. Such gaps might resemble inaccuracies. They also allow opportunities to create unfiltered dialogues, albeit dreamy (including with oneself), about fear, dystopia, and other maladies. The spirits come in all forms: hybrid beasts, new behemoths, a superior cosmic being who can travel across time, in undocumented ritual objects, or as vampires. They might be perceived as aliens, but at once, they feel familiar. We sense points of reverberation with them. In this work, Of Other Tomorrows Never Known, the spirit acts as a healer. In different ways, they represent attempts to cross boundaries. In turn, this allows ample room for absurdities and speculation. Their paths lead to uncertainties and chaos, which all beings must face. Questions remain: How do we stay human? And how can we build trans-species alliances? In the process, moments of healing temporarily break through.

Nuraini Juliastuti

Our digital culture has a strong material condition. It is based on millennia-old temporal strata containing the writing of terrestrial life. It is also the geological foundation where the archive of our collective memory has been written, from ancient to contemporary data technologies.

Memorial Matter deals with enigmatic crossovers between earthly materials and intertwined temporalities. The artists used an extensive historic 16mm film archive that reveals the use of industrial technology to extract natural resources as a sign of progress. They disrupt material temporalities using artificial neural networks to transform the progressive imaginaries from the cold war era into materials that refer to a future as distant as the past is to the minerals from which they were constructed. There is a shift from smooth, shiny and symmetrical forms to spaces of friction, imperfection and roughness – digital ruins as architectures of material memory.

From a practice that interweaves analog archives with digital media, Tin Wilke searches for morphological patterns in archival machines. These are used to propose the creation of fictional narratives about futures of coexistence, shifting the digital imaginary to the rematerialisation of a new possible space-time from the ruins of the Anthropocene age.

The process that has led Laura Fong Prosper to move from digital technologies to textile materials generates dialogues between apparently opposing media that retain a common root in deep planetary time. Starting from this idea, the artist proposes to turn our gaze towards technologies that bring us closer to other relationships with nature.

Memorial Matter is a hybrid installation co-created as joint artistic research by the artists to explore various image carriers such as 3D objects, textiles, and recycled fibres that emerge from the AI experiments with the 16-mm film archive material. The artists’ intention lies in the interaction between film archival material, digital technologies and organic processes to weave possible paths towards more sustainable futures. Digital speculations and the possibilities of making them tangible are proposed.

Angel Salazar

5 pm, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, Berlin

5 pm, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, Berlin

5 pm, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, Berlin

5 pm, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, Berlin

5 pm, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, Berlin

5 pm, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, Berlin

5 pm, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, Berlin

5 pm, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, Berlin

5 pm, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, Berlin

5 pm, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, Berlin

Foyer / Stairs
7 pm
Welcome
Clara Herrmann, Head of the JUNGE AKADEMIE
Nishant Shah, Professor (Assoc.) Global Media / Director, Digital Narratives Studio, The Chinese University, Hong Kong
Siegfried Zielinski, Professor für Medientheorie an der Universität der Künste Berlin und Mitglied der Sektion Bildende Kunst, Akademie der Künste, Berlin

Hall 1
7:30 pm
No Knots, Only Loops
Sarah Ciston
Performance, 20 min

8:30 pm
TRANSIENTS #1
M Takara – processed percussion
Pedro Oliveira – mel-filterbank
Performance, 20 min

Hall 2
8 pm
Ghosting the Machine
Sahej Rahal
Performance, 20 min

Reed Garden
9:30 pm
Wet.do Oasisdotwet
Petja Ivanova with Iyo Bisseck, Rain Rose and Kaya Zakrzewska
Performance, 30 min

Studiofoyer
10:15 pm
TRANSIENTS #2
Gugulethu Duma – voice, electronics
Pedro Oliveira – mel.filterbank
Performance, 30 min

10:45 pm
DJ-Set by ABIBA

Paramnesia SESSIONS
SONDER (Peter Behrbohm & Anton Steenbock)
4, 11, 18, 25 June 2023, 11:30 am – 3 pm
Hall 2

On five Sundays, the artist duo SONDER offers customer dialogues and experimental memory sessions in their inflatable capsule. In small private sessions, visitors are encouraged to access their recollections or insert constructed memory fragments. At the sales counter, it is possible to learn more about the utopias constituting Total.Earth, the Cosmists, as well as the so-called God-builders of the 19th century, and register for Total.Earth’s total services.

        - Max. 4 participants are allowed in the capsule at one time

        - Sessions last 5 – 20 min

        - On-site registration at the installation

Transient #3
Pedro Oliveira – mel-filterbank, electronics
13 June, 5 pm
Hall 1

TRANSIENTS looks closely at the history of the technologies expressed in the work The Emotional Residue of an Unnatural Boundary, taking them into speculative realms of possibility towards many futures. By engaging with the materiality of filtered sound and its aesthetic manifestation, this series of three performances expands the capabilities of thinking technical systems beyond extractivism and classification, and toward implicancy and relation.

Each performance deals differently with the haptic sonic qualities in the artwork, yet none of them actually engage in the process of filtering per se. Rather, the performers use a broad range of different sounds to “hold technology accountable”, that is, making them show themselves in the raw. By doing so, the relationship between what technology imparts to bodies is reversed – it is now bodies affecting into technology. They configure another set of relations that speculatively point to the establishment of novel understandings and relationships with systems and infrastructures around us, and their consequences on those of us who dwell and live in the borderlands.

Concert: The Quirk
D’Andrade
14 June, 5 pm
Hall 2

The Quirk is a concert generated from the sound archive created for the work A Thousand Years Loving You. The concert performs sound material used in the installation, offering a many-layered soundscape related to artificiality and nature. It implicitly decomposes a poem linked to each element that constitutes the installation, creating an open sound interpretation about the life of objects, humanity and remains.

Talk: POETRY CONVERSATION: Sarah Ciston & Swantje Lichtenstein – The filtration of machine-machines
As part of 24th poesiefestival berlin: no one is an island
15 June, 5:30 pm
Hall 1

How can we democratically and intersectionally make use of AI (Artificial Intelligence)? How can we counter the ways that the likes of ChatGPT promote and reproduce discrimination? In this poetry conversation, poet/programmer Sarah Ciston and poet/performance artist Swantje Lichtenstein will explore these questions academically and artistically. Together with Emma Braslavsky, they will discuss intersectional decoding, knowing machines, and critical and creative approaches to working with digitality and AI.

24th poesiefestival berlin: no one is an island

Over 150 artists from 30+ countries will present contemporary poetry: Arooj Aftab, Takako Arai, Meena Kandasamy, and others will read and perform at “Weltklang – Night of Poetry.” Kim Hyesoon will hold the Berlin Poetry Lecture. And: evenings on writing violence, writing identities, writing motherhood and political spoken word, poetry conversations with Eileen Myles and Alice Notley, 40 readings in the Buchengarten, concerts, a poetry market, and various offerings for “poetic education,” for poets in all stages to expand and deepen their sense of wonder at poetry and the world.

5 pm, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, Berlin

Within the cybernetic sensorium of Anhad, we find a masked demon conversing with an AI simulation that has turned sentient. He whispers remnants of ancient secrets and lost histories into feral machines roaming an uninhabited forest. Soon enough, their dialogue begins to dissolve, dissimulating speech into sound at the outer limits of language. The programme starts to dance in response, emanating notes of Hindustani music carried within its limbs. It sings back, creating an infinite song across the porous boundaries of myth, machine, mind and memory.