Ruins of the Simulated Mind: Sahej Rahal on Worlds After Collapse

17 Jul 2026

Interviewby Alexander Burenkov

Ruins of the Simulated Mind: Sahej Rahal on Worlds After Collapse

Interview by Alexander Burenkov

Sahej Rahal builds worlds that look as though someone else abandoned them. His game environments are overgrown, corroded, littered with debris; the creatures moving through them are half-modelled, assembled from mythological figures, obsolete architecture and internet junk. He calls the ruin the ultimate ambition of sculpture — an object that cracks, embeds, and is grown upon.

The artist works by hand. The virtual assets are modelled, not generated; the brass plates in Atithi were engraved with a Dremel, without preparatory drawings, to produce images meant for the fingertips rather than the eye. He takes the technique from the yantram, a devotional object from parts of India covered in etched diagrams.

Rahal's solo exhibition Beyond the City of Time ran at the Rudolfinum in Prague this spring, curated by Eva Drexlerová and Edith Lázár. Distributed Mind Test, one of the works shown, asks whether intelligence can exist in isolation: players are forced to negotiate and disagree rather than converge. Rahal is sceptical of most of the vocabulary that gets attached to his work. He doesn't consider current AI intelligent, following Matteo Pasquinelli in calling it statistical aggregation. He resists the idea that gaming is uniformly extractive. He is unconvinced that myths function as interfaces, though he grants they need each other — a bureaucracy is an interface, and the social contract is its myth.

We spoke about ruins, engraving, and what it might mean for thought to be democratic at the moment it takes shape.

Alexander Burenkov: In your works, the digital never appears clean or seamless — on the contrary, your game-like environments often resemble archaeological ruins or populated debris fields. Why is this aesthetic of technological decay so important to you?

Sahej Rahal: The “ruin” accomplishes what is, paradoxically, the ultimate ambition of sculpture. I don’t mean this as a finality in which an object that once existed is now gone, but the opposite: an object that has taken shape through a series of separations from the world becomes a continuous extension of it. It cracks, embeds, grows, and is grown upon — a scaffolding of signposts between what once was and what will soon come to pass.

AB: Many artists use game engines to create immersive environments, but your worlds often feel like systems that have already survived their own collapse. Are you interested in the idea of the post-digital ruin — the moment when technology begins to be perceived more as a fossil than as an innovation?

SR: My work is fundamentally an investigation of the narrative systems that define a phenomenon as either innovative or fossilized, or even as survival or collapse. What shapes the story being told, and to what end?

AB: Your virtual creatures often seem assembled from fragments of different historical epochs — mythology, industrial waste, AI imagery, gaming assets. Would you describe your practice as a form of media archaeology?

SR: I think of it less as media archaeology in the academic sense, and more as a kind of scavenging through the sediment of our collective imagination. The creatures emerge from fragments that already carry histories within them — mythological symbols, obsolete architectures, hallucinations, rumors, and internet debris. I’m interested in how these fragments continue to mutate as they circulate through technological systems.

AB: In previous interviews, you described storytelling as humanity’s first technology. But how does narrative itself change after the emergence of game engines, procedural systems, and AI simulations? Can narrative today exist outside computation?

SR: I don’t see a fundamental change in the structure of narrativization — stories still function in much the same way. What has changed with so-called “new” technologies, such as generative AI and social media, is the propagation of a rhetoric that suggests anyone can now create like artists or engineers. This claim is misleading in two ways: first, nothing made by humans is inherently beyond the reach of other humans; second, what these systems often produce is a regurgitation of what already exists.

AB: Your projects often resist traditional gaming logic based on victory, progression, or accumulation. How important is it for you to resist the extractive logic of contemporary gaming culture?

SR: The extractivist tendencies in gaming that gain media attention are not the norm. For every Call of Duty, there are entire subcultures of games exploring the depths of human experience. Even the works that stand out for emotional depth and philosophical rigor emerge from a long-standing ecosystem of developers steadily expanding the medium.

AB: In works such as DMT, collective thought appears as a distributed system. Do you see parallels here with social media, swarm intelligence, or algorithmic governance?

SR: Social media denies collective thought; any form of collective action that emerges through it does so in spite of it. DMT works in the opposite direction — it encourages disagreement and negotiation. Players become not a singular swarm, but a contingent of decentralized thought impulses that must play each other as much as they play the game.

AB: Your practice oscillates between the sculptural object and the simulated object. What happens to sculpture when it becomes a game asset or an AI-generated entity?

SR: I don’t generate assets using AI — I model them. So it’s still very much like sculpture in terms of labour, just slightly less messy.

AB: You are often asked about mythology, but I’m interested in something else: how do you think about interfaces? Has the interface replaced myth as a primary system of mediation between humans and reality? And is the religious interface of Hinduism important to your work?

SR: I wouldn’t think of myths as interfaces, because interfaces invite interaction, however mediated, whereas myths tend to remain materially and cognitively out of reach. That said, they require each other to function. If we strip both concepts of their technological and fantastical overtones and bring them closer to everyday systems, this entanglement becomes clear: a bureaucracy functions as an interface, while the narrative of the “social contract” operates as its myth.

AB: In your solo exhibition at Rudolfinum in Prague, which opened this spring, the scenography itself felt like a navigable system or fragmented map. How did you approach the exhibition space — more as a filmmaker, architect, level designer, or storyteller?

SR: All credit for the scenography of Beyond the City of Time goes to curators Eva Drexlerová and Edith Lázár. I’m deeply grateful for the immense care and precision with which they designed the space around the work, while also allowing audiences to enter it with their own imaginative charge.

AB: In this exhibition, the physical materiality of the works — metal plates, engraved surfaces, traces of manual labor — became especially important. Why is it essential for you to preserve tactile resistance of materials in the age of AI imagery?

SR: It’s not really a response to AI-generated imagery — I simply like making things with my hands.

AB: Your engravings and metal surfaces often resemble both damaged data storage and ancient tablets. Are you interested in engraving as an inscription technology — between carving a surface and digitally encoding information?

SR: I am drawn to these technologies out of pure curiosity; there’s a particular kind of religious ‘device’ that you find in parts of India called a ‘Yantram’, which carries fantastical imagery and diagrams etched upon it. But to tell you a secret, as the plates were meant to accompany Atithi and trigger its haptic responses, the drawings were made like a personal test at creating a textured surface that was meant to be touched rather than seen. I had these long brass plates in front of me and a Dremel, and I decided on a whim to just start drawing without any preparatory sketches or guide drawings to see if I could create imagery that could be perceived at the fingertips rather than the eye.

AB: Your works often stage a tension between organic growth and machinic systems. How do you see the relationship between AI and biological forms? Do you think AI is an extension of nature or its simulation?

SR: I don’t exactly think of what is described as AI today as intelligent in any sense of the word. As Matteo Pasquinelli suggests, it is better understood as statistical aggregation — and that is essentially what these systems do.

AB: Your virtual worlds rarely provide comfort; instead, they produce a sense of cognitive instability. How important is it for you to create environments that cannot be fully deciphered?

SR: The work I create can be thought of as a fragmented puzzle that I’m piecing together with the audience; we’re all playing at it together.

AB: In contemporary gaming culture, the player usually operates as a sovereign individual. In your works, however, the subject often dissolves into collective consciousness or hybrid entities. Is this a critique of contemporary individualism?

SR: Yes — that is the central question driving Distributed Mind Test: can intelligence exist in isolation?

AB: You work simultaneously with physical sculpture and immaterial simulation. How do you understand the status of the object after the digital turn? Can a digital object possess an aura or a form of material presence?

SR: I don’t see the two as different. The most incredible work of art I’ve encountered in recent years was the world of Disco Elysium, and the artist Aleksander Rostov, who was its art director, describes the entire game as a painting.

AB: Many of your characters resemble unfinished avatars or unstable bodies. To what extent has the culture of MMORPGs, online role-playing, and avatar-based existence influenced your practice?

SR: I don’t really play online games, so I don’t have too much experience with the kind of subjectivities they create.

AB: Your projects often feel like speculative ecosystems and and seem concerned with constructing democratic spaces. Are you interested in world-building as a form of political resistance, particularly in the context of contemporary India? What made you develop this political side of your practice?

SR: It´s more an inquiry into what it means to be democratic on a fundamental level — at the very first instance where thought takes shape — and whether we can arrive at this state of thinking through play.

BIOGRAPHY

Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural strategist and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Metabolizing Time: Propositions of Countering Linearity (MU Hybrid Art House, Eindhoven, 2026); Time That Grows Slowly (Dom Art Projects, Dubai, 2026); Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025); Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024); In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.

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