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

“His digital environments rarely resemble the polished imaginaries of technological progress. Instead, they appear eroded, overgrown, or already post-catastrophic — as if the infrastructures of computation had been discovered long after their cultural obsolescence. In this sense, Rahal’s “post-digital” aesthetic is not a rejection of technology but an insistence on seeing it as sedimented matter, entangled with history, myth, and decay.”

Sahej Rahal’s practice unfolds at the intersection of sculpture, simulation, mythology, and computational systems, where each category is constantly destabilized and reassembled into new speculative forms. Working across physical media such as metal, engraving, and installation, as well as virtual environments built through game engines, the Indian artist constructs worlds that resist coherence in the conventional sense. Instead, they operate as fragmented epistemologies — unstable systems in which meaning is perpetually forming, collapsing, and reforming again. A recurring tension in his work lies between the organic and the machinic, the archaeological and the speculative future. His digital environments rarely resemble the polished imaginaries of technological progress. Instead, they appear eroded, overgrown, or already post-catastrophic — as if the infrastructures of computation had been discovered long after their cultural obsolescence. In this sense, Rahal’s “post-digital” aesthetic is not a rejection of technology but an insistence on seeing it as sedimented matter, entangled with history, myth, and decay.

Narrative, in his practice, is never a linear structure of progression or resolution. It behaves more like a distributed field of cognition, in which stories emerge from collisions between fragments — mythological figures, industrial remnants, AI-generated debris, and internet artifacts. Rather than treating these materials as references, Rahal allows them to operate as active agents within his systems, each carrying its own temporal residue. The result is a form of world-building that feels less like design and more like excavation. The notion of the “ruin” becomes central for his projects — not as an endpoint of collapse, but as a generative condition in which form remains in constant negotiation with its environment. The ruin, in Rahal’s articulation, is not static but continuous: a site where sculpture expands beyond objecthood into relational systems of growth, contamination, and reinterpretation.

His engagement with game engines and simulation technologies further complicates the boundaries between object and environment, author and system. Yet unlike much of contemporary digital art that embraces seamless immersion, Rahal’s worlds remain deliberately resistant. They produce friction rather than flow, encouraging disorientation rather than mastery. In doing so, they question dominant logics of gaming culture — particularly those structured around accumulation, optimization, and individual sovereignty. At the same time, his sculptural practice insists on material resistance. The presence of engraved metal, hand-worked surfaces, and tactile imperfections becomes a counterpoint to computational abstraction. These objects do not simply “represent” digital systems; they embody alternative forms of inscription, where information is carved, scratched, and physically embedded rather than rendered through code alone. What emerges across Rahal’s practice is a sustained inquiry into intelligence itself — whether collective, distributed, or artificial — and the conditions under which it might take shape. His works propose that thought is never isolated, but always entangled with systems of mediation, whether mythological, bureaucratic, technological, or ecological. In this sense, his worlds are not depictions of alternative realities, but experiments in how reality is continually assembled.

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 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 happened 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 a form of 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 created it, 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 speak about constructing democratic spaces in your worlds. 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 can we arrive at this state of thinking through play.

BIOGRAPHY

Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer 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 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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