Ala (آلة): A Ritual Machine

Ala is a series of speculative personal machines that perform rituals on our behalf. Built from spring steel, polymer clay and small robotic systems, each machine carries a single repetitive gesture in its body. When a visitor rests their hands on top of one, the gesture begins. The data of that activation is projected onto an altar wall, mapping the machine's programming and the states of synchrony between it and the others in the room. Each machine can perform a solitary, personal ritual, or fall into shared rhythm with the others to enact a collective ceremony.

The work begins with a small linguistic coincidence. In Arabic, the word for machine, آلة, is a single character away from the word for gods, آلهة. Shono treats this as more than coincidence. Rituals, in his telling, are the user manuals our species developed for emotional life: a sequence of gestures, movements and sounds that carry us through mourning, celebration and everything in between, returning us to what we have collectively and individually agreed is a balanced state.

In contemporary life, the ritual act has been dismissed, diminished, or exploited, until ritual itself can feel mechanical and empty. Shono's response is to take the accusation literally. If ritual has been reduced to machine work, then let a machine perform it, faithfully and without fatigue, until the visitor remembers what the gesture was for.