Sahej Rahal

‘Distributed Mind Test’ is a cooperative multiplayer videogame that invites players to explore and inhabit a virtual architecture shared by human and extra-human forms of intelligence. Embodying a three-legged organism, players enter a world spiraling across space-time, seemingly devoid of all human life. Following humanity’s exit, AI-controlled creatures now populate the game world. They wander across transdimensional gateways that dot the digital landscape. These beings communicate not in language but through movement. Learning and responding to their moves, allows players to enact cross-temporal rituals of hide-and-seek. A fractured storyline is presented through “memory boxes” that narrate journalistic entries, archaeological records, and mythological rumors; to weave a philosophical inquiry into the separation of the human mind and the world it has come to inhabit across history. DMT unfolds at the intersection of game design and storytelling, to create a porous manifesto of ludic intelligence. It proposes a ‘thought-at-play’ that stands in contrast to the affective aura of technological intelligence or techne. Pervading across psycho-social and geopolitical structures today, techne conjures an image of the planet as computable clockwork, transforming all that lies upon the Earth into a stockpile of requisitions awaiting to be ossified into its machinic movements. Codified, categorized, and cut away from the whole. It overwhelms human cognitive capacities with planetary-scale obfuscations of boredom, banality, and bad faith that distract and deceive us into believing that every day and everywhere is always all the same. Yet the same technologies lulling us into inactive spectatorship, hold unlikely trapdoors of escape. Tracing these exits along borderlines of cognition, the gameplay systems and narrative trajectories of DMT embody discursive tools that invite speculation, dissensus, negotiation and debate. Players enact collective rituals of world-making as they navigate the game-space and its contingencies. Unassimilated and unbound in DMT, intelligence goes to play on a rehearsal ground for democratic thought. A single question drives the Distributed Mind Test; how do we share space with each other? Each element of the game is designed as a pathway that leads to a multitude of possible answers. The narrative structure of DMT is fragmented across the game-space as a series of audio dispatches. An anonymous voice narrates tales from the world gone by. It speaks of the vanishing of the human race, drawing upon folk legends, conspiracy theories, metaphysical speculations, and apocalyptic prophecies. Yet players approach these tales non-sequentially, stitching them together in their own patchwork fictions of origins and endgames.

About the Artist

Sahej Rahal (born 1988, Mumbai, India) is an artist and assistant professor of Design Media Arts at, UCLA.

Rahal is primarily a storyteller. He creates counter-mythologies that interrogate narrations of the present. This myth world takes the shape of sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, video games, and AI simulation programs. Drawing upon folklore, prophecies, archaeological conspiracies, hidden histories, and occult manuscripts, he renders scenarios where the fictive and the real begin to converse, at the borderlines of myth and memory. Rahal’s art practice has been featured in international exhibitions, including Sonsbeek 2026, Munch Triennial 2025, the 2024 Biennial of Moving Images at Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva, The Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, Manifesta14, the Gwangju Biennale, the Liverpool Biennial, the Kochi Biennale, the Vancouver Biennale, Transmediale, MACRO Museum Rome, Kadist SF, ACCA Melbourne, CCA Glasgow and the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai, and most recently an institutional solo at the Galerie Rudolfinum titled ‘Beyond the City of Time’.

He is the recipient of the Cove Park/Henry Moore Fellowship, Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship, the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation Installation Art Grant, the Digital Earth Fellowship, the first Human- Machine Fellowship organized by Junge Akademie ADK, the Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellowship 2024, the ‘Enter the Hyperscientific’ fellowship program 2025 organized by EPFL Pavilions in Lausanne, Switzerland, the La Becque Artist in residence program fellowship in Switzerland, and the Tate Infinities Research Grant from Tate Gallery, London UK, and most recently the 2026 AGORA fellowship organized by Federico Campagna at Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva.