( آلة) Ala: A Ritual Machine

Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2018

Muhannad Shono.jpg

Speculative machines that perform rituals on our behalf

Spring steel wires, polymer clay & robotics, 2018

This interactive work is a speculative series of personal machines that perform rituals on our behalf through mundane repetitive movements. The word for machine in arabic is آلة which is one character away from the word آلهة meaning gods.

As our species evolved in emotional complexity, rituals simultaneously emerged to act as our “user manuals” to wide-ranging emotional states of being. Whether in mourning or in celebration, rituals help us navigate through the fog of sorrow and the excesses of joy, They bring us back to what we collectively and individually accept as a balanced state. Rituals are identified by their sequence of activities, often physical, involving gestures, movements and sounds.

It is this physical expression of an emotional state that rituals wish to define. In our contemporary state, the function of the ritual act has been dismissed, diminished or exploited, rendering our perception of ritual as a mechanical, meaningless task. And so, new ritual machines emerge, driven by evolving emotional algorithms, to guide us back to the true role of ritual in our lives. The function of these machines is to perform the physical, repetitive act on our behalf.

By placing one’s hands on top of each machine the ritual motion begins. The data being gathered live from each machine is projected onto an altar wall that visualizes the programming doctrine as well as the different states of activation and synchronicity.

The machines can perform ‘personal’ solitary rituals, or can automatically synchronize movement with other machines in the space to perform a collective rhythmic ceremony.

Ala: a ritual machine was in collaboration with Prof. Manfred Hild of the Neurorobotics Research Laboratory, Berlin. With research funding from the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra)