HALLUCINATION STREAM

Sahej Rahal

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Introduction

Nina Davies

You're listening to Future Artefacts FM , a bi-monthly podcast/broadcast featuring speculative fiction audio works by artists and writers produced and presented by Nina Davies,

Rebecca Edwards

Niamh Schmidtke

and Niamh Schmidtke, on RTM

and also available on podcast channels.

The programme focuses on fictional works intended for broadcast to carve out a better understanding of the now by exploring various interpretations of the future.

Together with guests we discuss the mechanics of different types of storytelling to reveal the complexities of contemporary culture. Let’s get started.

All

Let’s get started.

This miniseries is commissioned by Henry Moore Institute to accompany their exhibition, Phantasmagoria Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age, open 15th May, 2026 to 30th of August, 2026.

For more information, just visit the Henry Moore Institute website.

Artist Introduction

Okay. Welcome back to Future Artefacts FM. As per usual, I'm your host, Nina Davies.

I'm Rebecca Edwards.

And I'm Niamh Schmidtke. Welcome to episode 36 and the second episode of our new mini-series, Phantasmagoria Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age. It's a long title. And we're here today with our first artist commission of the new mini-series, Sahej Rahal. Welcome to the show, Sahej. How are you?

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.

It's great. We're actually recording. We're recording this one remotely. I think we'll be recording most of these episodes remotely.

We have a very international group of artists for this mini-series, which is really exciting. You're speaking with us from Bombay.

Just to introduce you before we get into the conversation, Sahej Rahal 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.

I feel like you're a pretty perfect starter artist for this series. So thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you. Thank you.

You're sharing some sections from your work called Hallucination Stream, which is sort of a, I guess, a work in progress. But we're going to be sharing three sections of it, and we're going to be playing those three sections sort of throughout the episode, rather than all together.

So before we actually get into the work, I'm actually just going to go straight in with our first question. Before people listen to it. So to start things off, can you tell us a little bit about Hallucination Stream? Because the document kind of examines different forms of illusion by telling stories, and provides specific settings before you kind of get into the story. And each section is also accompanied by an illusion axis diagram.

We can share this document in the show notes for anyone who wants to read it. It kind of sits somewhere between a screenplay or a script, but then also something like a kind of academic methodology.

So I kind of wanted to ask you a little bit where the desire for this study of illusion kind of came from, and maybe what it's sort of working towards.

Thank you, Nina. So Hallucination Stream was originally written for a book that Blaft Publications in Chennai published. It's called the Blaft Anthology of Anti-Caste Sci-Fi, SF, so speculative fiction. It's a collection of stories that sort of confront or confront caste through, or interrogate caste through like a speculative lens, like you know who are drawing from myths, sci-fi, you know, reimagining like stories that have like, you know, or even urban legends around caste and how they've sort of materialized, you know, on the every day.

So the stories that I shared as part of the anthology, Hallucination Stream, is essentially a collection of, I guess you could call them micro-fictions. They're kind of disjointed, they have a sort of hold to them, but they're essentially looking at how the kind of mythology, the sort of, there's this kind of cosmic anatomy of caste that sort of, the idea of caste or like the caste system itself sort of rests on and is then, you know, kind of propagated. So unlike other forms of oppression, I guess, you could say, caste is premised solely on a myth and it's a myth of this cosmic man at the center of the universe and his like, you know, kind of body and like his anatomy kind of gives rise to the caste hierarchy. So his head gives rise to the high caste, Brahman's and the further down you go, you get like, you know, the lower caste. And essentially, what happens is people who do not belong to this cosmic hierarchy, do not belong to society and you see this kind of getting sort of taking concrete shape in the form of like, you know, citizenship laws and yeah, like it's sort of becoming like sort of a hyperstition essentially, like, you know, it's this kind of made up story that like, you know, becomes real. I just want to roll back on like, you know, something I said, like, you know, I mean, other forms of bigotry aren't necessarily valid because they might have like, you know, something like skin colour or like, you know, I don't know, sexual orientation attached to them. They're still narratives.

Yeah, but I think there can be a sense of them being backed up by some ridiculous or sort of fake forms of enlightenment sciences to sort of qualify or validate the bigotry in question, whether as, I think what's quite different about this is there isn’t that same attempt, or rather the attempt is made through this mythology or through this sort of folklore as you’re sort of expanding upon in this text.

Yeah, yeah, like, I mean, to phrase it differently, I guess, like, you know, there's a lot of hallucination and myth-making that happens behind, like, you know, other forms of, like, bigotry, like, you know, like racism or like, you know. But the lore behind the caste is, like, way more thicker, like, and you have fan fiction and things like that playing out, like even now in, like, you know, Silicon Valley, for example. The idea behind it is, like, this, the story is kind of like told to you with these, like, you know, kind of gods and demons and like, you know, epic narratives. So it's its own kind of, you know, that's where the, I guess, difference comes in. But like, you know, they're all narratives at the end of the day.

Where this goes is like, you know, so this text and these texts and like some more that I've been writing will eventually enter this game that I've been working on called Distributed Mind Test, which, you know, you sort of encounter them as these kind of flashbacks and like, you know, kind of diary entries and recordings that are sort of strewn across the world. The game itself is kind of like, you know, exhausted of human life. And it's also kind of looking at like how caste kind of became a global phenomenon as well, when sort of globalization came to India and how that sort of is one of the many kind of strange narratives of a glorious past that the right likes to stand on, you know, and it's fan fiction sort of as well. So it's kind of looking at these narratives and how they're sort of playing themselves out in the real world.

And in terms of the game, how will the game or how do you envisage the game being played? Are you a person or a character in the game kind of navigating this world? Or are you, I don't know, are you an illusion yourself like as the player?

Yeah, like so the way the game, just to give you a brief idea of what it's all about is like you play as one of like a three legged kind of tiny creature that's kind of crystalline in shape, and you're wandering through different kinds of environments. The way the kind of central premise of the game is, it's a cooperative multiplayer game. The way it works is like, you know, say all of us are playing together. So we have four controllers and like, say I move forward and Nina you move to the right, then the characters start shuffling diagonally, and then it has these abilities that you can perform, but like, you know, depending on who presses what button,

So the players kind of almost become one body together.

Essentially, yeah, like, you know, you're kind of this collective hive mind that's controlling the creature. One compliment I got for the game, I guess, like was, it's great for couples therapy. So yeah, you have to negotiate with whoever you're playing with. And then it's an exploration game, so you encounter other creatures and like things like that.

Yeah, I'll probably put out a demo soon. This gives me a little bit of a push.

Okay, perfect.

So if it's a massively multiplayer online game, like if there were 100 players, say, all in the game at once, would they all move together as a hive mind as well? So like all 100 players moving through the world together? And what if I want to break off and explore something else? Do I get the chance to do that? Or is it all about negotiation of groups?

Oh, sorry, I should have mentioned it's a couch co-op game. Like, you know, so there's no online multiplayer. So like you're playing with someone right next to you.

I see. I mean, maybe that brings us quite nicely into the first reading, which will be the simulation section.

Okay, great. We'll play the first segment and we'll see you back in a couple of minutes.

Extract 1: Simulation

Illusion Type Simulation

Location Rupa-Loka (The Realm of Forms).

Time Sushupti. When consciousness itself abandons the mind to roam the universe; the third state of sleep.

The Hindi word for democracy is ganatantra. Tantra signifies system, structure, machinery, contraption, and schematic. Gana, on the other hand, alludes to a group, gathering, troop or flock of a highly particularised variety. In Hindu scripture, the Gana are the ghostly attendants of Shiva. Commanded by Shiva’s elephantine son Ganesha, whose name declares him the regent of ghosts, they descend from Mount Kailash to populate the State of Sleep. Svatantra, the word for independence in Hindi, does not necessarily translate to freedom. Sva, in this assemblage, signifies the Self. Yet it is nowhere to be found. A being in absentia, premised on a matrix of non-dualist negations networked across Vedic scripture. The self is instead neti neti (neither this nor that). A symptom of sensorial limitations and reactionary impulses, all bundled up in bags of meat and bone. Enacting such negations through mass incarceration, citizenship registers, and police action, the State of Sleep dreams itself to be Sanaatan, an exact simulacrum of time itself; eternal, absolute, and unmoving, denying entry to all manner of men that might try and trespass its slumber. Ghosts, however, are known to move differently.

Illusion Axis; state, slumber, citizen, spectre

Conversation

Okay, welcome back. We hope you enjoyed that. So Sahej, I'm gonna jump straight into a question about that section that we just heard. So at the end of it, it says, ghosts, however, are known to move differently. And I'm really interested in the way that the ghosts are described throughout this Hallucination Stream. In another section in Spell, I'm really interested in the way that you describe these particular ghosts.

So we've got Phasma, the Ghost of Sight, Paracusia, Ghostly Hearings, Phantosmia, Ghosts That Smell, Phantogasia, Taste Phantoms, which are often bitter and metallic. So all of these ghosts as being these kinds of sensory inputs that form the self. And even at the most basic level, maybe, by this logic, our perception of self is glitchy and hallucinatory and riddled with these things that we can't quite grasp, these kinds of intangible elements. In that section as well, you state, or it's stated, there's this pentagram of self-sense perception. And this is also something I wanted to note here. So these five senses are arranged like a system or a ritual structure, suggesting that the self is maybe something that's always in flux.

So if the self is this fragile illusion built from these unreliable senses, does that make thinking or thought an illusion as well?

Right, unreliable. You know, I've actually been thinking about how this kind of messy process of cognition occurs. And I came across this idea that Aristotle actually speaks about, that cognition, like, I mean, he might be wrong, but, you know, he sort of placed cognition, like the sparking of thought at ignition, the point of contact where we, our bodies come in contact with the world and he places touch, like, higher than, like, whatever process is taking place in the mind. So, for example, like, you know, I mean, the contrary to how we see, like, you know, like, you sort of touch, say, a hot glass of water, and then it sends an impulse to your brain, and then it sort of, your brain then cognizes it, that this is hot.

He's kind of inverting that, like, he's saying, you cognize it the moment you touch it, you know, so on your fingertips. And another thing he says is that, this faculty of touch, so all your other senses are receptive, right? Like, you see, you hear, but then touch is kind of works both ways, you know, it's this two-way highway, right? Like, you can not only, like, receive from the world, but you can also access it, intervene into it, like, you know, touch allows us this kind of mosaic of expression, you know, assertive, affectionate, aggressive, all at the same time, right?

And then he goes further on to say that touch is not only fundamental to every sentient life form, it is also integral to our kind of, not just sustenance, but flourishing, like, you know, for us to sort of be in the sort of goal, in our wholeness, you know, in a certain way. So that's happening in Aristotle. And like, you know, if you were to sort of compare it to Descartes, who says, I think, therefore I am, right? Like he sort of places thought before being, right?

Like where Aristotle would then say, I am because I feel, you know, I feel my way through the world. And you find a very similar strain of thought in, you know, the kind of middle path of Buddhism. So, you know, there's this idea of Maya, right? Like the world is an illusion and needs to be transcended. What the middle path says is Maya is essentially the illusion is the illusion of a perceived world, but a real world does exist, right?

And this real world, the world of Maya needs to be transgressed to the real world. And the real world is one, the one that you feel. And I don't mean this in some kind of esoteric way, you know, that there's no…

The one that you touch.

Yeah, yeah, literally, like, you know, you know the world around you is real because you feel it on your body, right? Like you feel the heat or the cold or the rain on your body or like you feel the bodies around you through touch, right? Like, I mean, say, your partner, like, you know, when they embrace you, you know, like, you feel the love they have for you, right? Like, immediately outside, before language, you know, right? Like, I mean, that sort of is felt bodily, right? So, like, that kind of allows us to sort of, you know, escape that kind of realm of illusions.

I mean, one could almost maybe even argue that sight is also when light touches a surface. Like, it's not like, even though it's not like a material touch, it's still, it's sort of still this contact that is made.

No, it's very material. In fact, like, you know, I mean, the rays that touch your iris, like, you know, it will allow certain things to pass through and sort of not, right? Like, same for sound, same for, like, you know, your eardrums vibrating and like, even with, like, taste, you know, and smell, like, you know, so it's all, it's all really touched, like, you know, it's just like...

I'm wondering, like, where these ghosts exist, though, like, for example, ghosts that smell. I just think that's so wonderful. But where does that Phantos...Phantosmia exist?

My kitchen last week, honestly. I mean, that's, well... So, like, you know, I lost my father last year and I'm kind of living in his house, so some nights when I come home, I can smell his aftershave.

So in that sense, there may be kind of lingering after-effects of something. Like, I'm thinking about the sort of taste phantoms. Actually, the smell phantoms. Like, smell is one of those senses that is very tied to memory, even more so than sight, I would argue. Like, you know, walking into your old primary school, you instantly get transported to being, like, a six-year-old child because of that smell. So maybe these are ghosts that, you know, they're not ghosts as we would maybe perceive them, but they're like these, they're like the aftermath of something.

They're always there, but they kind of just come to us maybe through, I don't know, through, at different points in our life, when we need them, maybe.

Yeah, like, you know, so this particular smell, this ghostly smell, or spectral kind of smell, is one that doesn't really exist in the real world, you know, it's sort of, like, the memory of it is in your nostril, you know? So, which is, like, strange, right?

Have you read Katherine Hale's book, Unthought? Because she talks about the cognitive non-conscious, so that that same thing of, like, when you touch something, your body instantly starts cognizing that thing, and it operates, I can't remember, I think it's something like five times faster than consciousness, basically. And so...

Yeah, but I was going to say even that that's also, you know, not necessarily for humans, it's also a way in which we would react to, like, I'm thinking about this sense of smell also in terms of if you have a pet, like, a cat, for example, will recognize your scent, you know, or a dog will sort of recognize the sound of your footsteps as you approach a door. That it's also a way that's sort of, like, I'm thinking about these ghostly beings and this kind of role of mythology, but also

something that kind of came across for me in thinking about ghosts is that role of the non-human or potentially of the animalistic as well. And these, I think the interesting thing in Hales' work in Unthought is that it becomes, cognition becomes a way of sort of drawing these connections between, let's say, the human brain, animal brain and digital infrastructures and sort of plant life as well. And I wonder, that sort of feels like an interesting point in terms of your work, Sahej, because I think there's also this sense when you're talking about these mythologies and these kind of three sections that we're going to hear across the episode. There's a sense, too, of you drawing together specific places and time.

I'm thinking in particular the last section that you'll hear and this role of kind of sculpture and world making also relies on these forms of sort of maybe ghostliness or cognition within not just the human brain, but all the beings that would inhabit the planet.

This is like, particularly with the game and these kind of AI simulations I've been working on. That's essentially what I'm trying to trace, like where does this capacity for thought take shape? And how do we hold on to it? Not hold on to it, but kind of render it in a form that we can kind of discuss. Like the game is literally the elevator pitch for the game is getting people to think together and make friends at the end of the world, I guess. But the question it's asking is like, can thought happen in complete absence of another being? Like can we have thought just by ourselves? Like how I guess like Descartes says, I think therefore I am, I cognize the world, right? Like it's very singular and I don't think so. Like we are not in isolation, we're always thinking with everything and everyone around us, like sort of shaping that faculty, right?

I guess also we're like, we're always thinking in context, kind of in relation to the culture, the geography, even like the gender in our bodies, we're always thinking through that context, whether it's immediately apparent to us or not, that it's always impacting in some ways. They're all constructions, but ones that deeply affect how we will approach the world. Maybe that's a nice way to segue into our next question and I'm sort of opening up from this conversation about ghosts to kind of speaking more generally, I think, about your practice, but also linking it more closely to the exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute.

And the thing that really struck me with this work is the ways in which you blend history, mythology and digital media, obviously, we're reading excerpts of a text that are almost like, you're adding to the language of mythology, you're sort of almost generating it in these ways. And I want to ask then, how does digital folklore operate as a tool in your practice?

We're starting to talk about sort of roles of cognition, and as we kind of spoke about with Sean in the previous episode, you know, folk can be anything. And I think here you're talking about it in quite a specific way. So if you could, yeah, talk a little bit about maybe some of the terms that you think about in your practice and how those operate as tools in maybe this work specifically, but also the game. Yeah.

So, I mean, I actually don't see a distinction between, like, you know, like, I guess, digital and like, I don't know, like, you know, like, it's all like story, stories, right? Like, you know, like, you know, I mean, storytelling is sort of like the first kind of, like, I guess, technology that we had, like, you know, as a civilization or as a species to kind of, like, you know, sort of kind of like carries us through and forward and like, you know, in whichever way sort of like renders and articulates like, you know, memory, history, all of it into something that that can be carried forward. Like, you know, that's how I sort of see folklore and story telling generally. And like, I mean, video games are just like, you know, one kind of aspect of it. I think, like, you know, I mean, as is painting, as is, like, sculpture, as is, like, poetry, it's all, it's all, it's all a big story.

So when you think about digital folklore, or I guess I'm thinking kind of more specifically in the context of the themes of the Phantasmagoria, is it a sense of, you're just working with it in a contemporary age? These are the languages that we speak through now. Does that feel kind of part of where that interest in your practice comes from in terms of, I guess, I'm thinking of the sort of hive mind game infrastructure?

Yeah, like, like, you know, just to, like, you know, kind of, I guess, push at that distinction. Like, you know, when we say digital, the idea is that, like, you know, okay, something that kind of lies outside the realm of technology, right? Like, but then if you were to just for a second, like, kind of, you know, think of a spot on your body, right, that isn't touched by the internet, you know?

REI would say there are no parts on my body that have not been touched by the internet, for sure. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's your point.

Like, where does the digital end and then the, you know, I guess, whatever came before it began? Like, you know, I mean, we sort of, we see time collapsing in that way, and like space also collapsing with the internet. Like, I mean, I actually have a memory of a world without an internet, you know, without a computer as well, but it's a very distant memory, like.

I think for me, when I'm thinking about digital folklore in relation to specifically this piece of work, this Hallucination Stream, there's one of the time sort of markers for one of the illusions Nightmare, it says that the time that exists in is the shortest instant of recorded time. And to me, that feels very much in line with what we're talking about when we're talking about digital folklore, because to me, a part of digital folklore is a kind of meme practice or it's a kind of like a reddit thread discussing something that's trending or it's all of these sort of small things that become embedded within a larger language of folklore that spreads on the internet. So I'm kind of, yeah, I'm thinking about what it means to have the shortest instant of recorded time and that

maybe digital folklore in this instance is just a bunch of like short instance of recorded time that kind of solidify themselves and then expand. But yeah, there's definitely something in there that relates to that for me.

Yeah, so like, you know, you're speaking about kalp or kalpa. So essentially it's time measured by thought, you know, to and like, you know, when you kind of read the epics, like, you know, the Mahabharata or the Ramayana, you have like vessels moving at the speed of thought, you know, or arrows flying at the speed of thought.

Is that meant to be faster than the speed of light or?

Yeah, because thought happens before light, right? Like, you know, I mean, but it's also like, you know, a word used to describe the passing of eons, like, you know, I mean, like, you know, ages have unfolded in that kind of thought. This kind of, you know, sort of comparable to another, like, you know, idea that like everything, everything that's unfolding in front of us right now, time itself is this like kind of instant that like, you know, it's just stretched out, like, this

thought that's kind of like stretched out and is being kind of segregated so that we don't lose our minds, I guess. Like, you know, and so we rent time in order to not like, like, subsumed by this, like, you know, instant.

I mean, whether it's really how time unfolds or not is like anyone's guess, you know, this is the way we are experiencing it. That's what's important. But like, you know, I love these like kind of wild sort of speculations that like, you know, you find in like, I mean, in Vedic scripture and like, you know, that there's these, there's a gesture beneath them, which I do think kind of like removes you from the present. You know what I mean? Like, there's this idea that like, you know, what you are experiencing right now is not you and you’re like, you know, kind of what you feel on your body is not really what the real world is. So it's kind of this strange kind of like, transcendental idea that's sold, because that can be extended in all sorts of violent ways as well, right? Like, you know, I mean, when none of this is real, then like, it is of no consequence, right? So you can do what you wish with it. So it does get extended in some like, strange ways. But just as a kind of, you know, wild sort of speculation, deeply fascinating. And you find different shapes and forms that this thing is being given to, you know, like, you have the idea of Prashant Bangur, which is like, you know, the universe was created and kind of like, dissolved in like, a single instant. And then you have the idea of the Mahapralaya, which is literally the mega apocalypse, you know, like, when all things shall finally end.

But then you have Nityapralaya, which is like, you know, this kind of slow disillusion towards the end, you know, everything is sort of receding back into some kind of remodelled form that we came from. So, and, you know, I mean, they all kind of like, contravene each other, contradict each other. So like, you know, occupying a cosmology of timelines, yeah.

I think that's quite a good segue into the next segment that we're going to listen to, the illusion type of story, sort of semi-semi-title of the segment. So we'll give that a listen, and we'll see you back in five minutes.

Extract 2: Story

Illusion Type Story

Location Unakoti. A rock-cut stairway to heaven, sculpted with the faces of nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety- nine divine entities that will be allowed entry into the hereafter (the only absent face being that of the human).

Time Subh-E-Azal. The dawn before the beginning of recorded time.

Unlike the idols they carve, sculptors are cut with a raw deal across Vedic scripture. Thvastr, the first sculptor, was once known as Vishwaroopak, or World-Shaper. He was the architect among the old gods, holding equal rank among Varuna (who was both ocean and sky), Agni (who was fire), Mitra (who was both the promise and the keeper of its bond), and Soma (who was intoxication).

Thvastr himself was a master of many arts. He carved rocks, embedding them with unformed jewellery. He terraformed entire planets, as well as the nether-realms beneath them, by lowering lakes and raising mountain ranges. He planted the forests, washed the valleys, and sanded down the deserts.

This world that Thvastr shaped was governed by an economy of gifts–for he had many more presents to offer. He gave Kali her tongue and Shakti her strength. To Shiva he gave a third eye that would remain closed until the sleep of time, and to Indra he gave a thousand eyes to watch over its waking. To the humans that roamed the world, he gave heft, haught, hilarity, heavy-handedness, and humility, sculpting spirit upon the entire species in equal share. These gifts, and the sheer skill of their craftsmanship, inflamed the envies of Vishnu, the Preserver, who was soon to be tasked with the upkeep of these offerings. Roused by resentment, a critic was born.

Vishnu launched a smear campaign upon the creations of the World-Shaper. Thvastr’s designs, he said, came with defects. His giraffes gave birth standing upright, dropping their offspring from a height of two whole meters. Flightless birds carried wings; blind snakes bore eyes; and male mammals came with nipples.

This collection of complaints condemned all of creation, reprimanding it to remain forever flawed–a civilizational curse that has since followed every sculptor bold enough to pick up a hammer.

Illusion Axis; Shape, shift, risk, mistake

Conversation

Okay, welcome back. That was the second of three segments of Hallucination Stream that we will be listening to in this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. We all hope you enjoyed it.

To get back into the conversation, I mean, this segment, looking at story as a form of illusion, it obviously really resonates with the themes of sculpture, which we're looking at in this mini-series. And so I'm kind of interested in this relationship that you propose between the sculptor as a world-shaper or creator and the critic as a condemner of kind of janky sort of creation. And I couldn't help but wonder whether there was something personal in this from you as a sculptor and as a storyteller. I really felt there was, when I finished reading that section, I couldn't help but think that there was really the mark of you as the writer of this in there. So, yeah, maybe I just wanted to kind of ask you a little bit about that.

Ah, no, no, I don't think I'm the sculptor god. I'm not the world's shaper. I am the one who is going to remind the world shaper who they truly are.

You're the one who's going to remind the world shaper of who they truly are.

Yes.

Okay.

Keep them in check in case their ego gets too big.

I mean, yeah, yeah, like, I think they'll be able to deal with it.

But I think there's obviously this, you know, when you talk about with the game, you know, you, this sort of three-legged creature that you've made within the game, this obviously it's very much part of it. And you've also sort of, you've created these sculptures that kind of almost, you yourself have kind of mimicked this performance of the world shaper, making these sort of three-legged sculptures with defects. And then you sort of animate them, you kind of make these real world sculptures, and then you animate them in these sort of virtual worlds. So do you, yeah, so do you see yourself in this work as Thvaster?

I don't know if I've said that, I don't know if I've said that correctly.

Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, yeah, like, I mean, that's what's exciting about, like, game design and, like, programming and, like, kind of actually, like, you know, struggling with all of it.

Yeah.

It's this immense, like, puzzle to solve, you know, like, that idea of, like, the worldshaper, like, I, okay, the reason I say that, like, I'm the one who reminds the worldshaper who they are, who they truly are, is because we all are, you know, like, we all really are, like, you know, I mean, all of us who decide to pick up the hammer, I guess, or, like, you know, create, like, in the most basic, fundamental way, like, you know, I mean, there's this idea in the Quran that, like, you know, we are the eyes and the hands and the ears and the mouth of God, you know, of the Almighty. It's this beautiful line, you know, where it says that, like, I was a, this is the Almighty speaking, I was a hidden creature that desired to be seen, right? And that is why I created the creature, right? Like, you know, that's why I created the being that could somehow recognize me. And, like, you know, I mean, we're all kind of, like, aspects of that, that kind of unfolding creation, right?

Like, and we have to kind of, like, despite all the sort of ways in which we've, like, siloed ourselves, find each other in the, and, like, when we're doing that is by creating, right? Like, you know, I mean, we're all the world shaper.

Well, yeah, I wanted, I wanted to ask about those defaults, because I think this is something that all artists kind of encounter, right? In fact, anybody that is creative will encounter this, this kind of wrath of maybe, or this envy of Vishnu, maybe, who, he's roused by resentment, and so he kind of, yeah, he lands this smear campaign upon the world, and it just makes me think of the ways in which the art is critiqued, or these sort of defaults that I would actually call very interesting and intriguing parts of work, how these are kind of laid bare and really picked apart. And I think you make this very obvious in the text, you know, this idea that the giraffes give birth, dropping their offspring from two meters, and these kinds of things. And at the end, you're saying that this sort of collection of complaints has condemned all of creation, so actually to create is not without its criticisms, and maybe that is a good thing, right? I think this feels like what you're trying to say.

And also then to come back to your game making, the illusion axis of this feels very relevant, you know, the shaping, the shifting, there's an element of risk in there, and there's also these mistakes. So it feels like you're kind of giving us this manifesto for creation almost. It's like, great, go do your creating, but also be aware that these things are going to be criticized because to create is a very potentially privileged position, it seems to be. I mean, from what this text is kind of saying, the way that he sands down the deserts and washes the valleys, I'm just imagining this like incredibly powerful, massive hand just coming down and like with his sandpaper, just sanding like the Gobi Desert or something. But yeah, yeah.

Yeah, like, I mean, I don't know if it's like something that's privileged per se, it's just like the world shaper shapes the world because that's what the world shaper does, you know. It's sort of being like that, that's what, like if Agni is fire, then Vishwaroopak is like the one that shapes the world, you know. So, like fire burns, that's all it has to do, right? Like, you know. So, these ideas sort of embody these, like, just these actions without like, like the purpose is the action, you know, in that sense.

Whereas Vishnu, particularly, and you see him like, you know, throughout the many avatars that he kind of takes, like, you know, ends up, ends up playing a very like, a kind of role that, where he is not really, that distinction between purpose and action is kind of very evident. Like, you know, sort of like, sometimes they are very contradictory as well. Like, I mean, if you see his role in the Mahabharata, for example, there is this like, you know, kind of like, penultimate moment where Arjun, who is like this archer, has this like, you know, moment of crisis.

Like, so he is like the greatest warrior ever? And the only thing that could stop him is an existential crisis. Like, you know, why am I doing any of this? Like, why are we waging war? And at that moment, like, you know, Krishna, Vishnu as Krishna is like charioteer, so stops mid-battle and the entire battle also stops. And Vishnu starts narrating to him the law of Karma, right? Like that, you are a warrior, you need to perform, you know, you are a weapon, essentially. That's what he is being told and you do what weapons do. Now, here, you see, so what he narrates is actually the Gita, the Bhagavad Gita, right?

That's the story of where the Gita actually came from. So, here, like you see, you know, Vishnu performing a very kind of, like another form of intelligence which is coming, right? Like, you know, where he is driving men's passions to work certain ends. You know what I mean? In fact, there's this other story that, like, you know, when Vishnu came in his previous avatar as Ram, who was very benevolent and like image of like, you know, goodness, so to speak, there was too much good in the world that he brought. So, he had to come back as Krishna as the kind of naughty, like, you know, the kind of cunning, conniving.

The troublemaker.

Yeah, the troublemaker, yeah. And if you look at Krishna's stories, there's quite a lot of trouble that he kind of, you know, rides up. But then that's Vishnu and like, you know, I mean, so you see the figure of the critic in that. Like, you know, I mean, this entire, like, I mean, how do we deal with criticism is always like a tough one, right? Like, you know, I mean, one thing that I found, like, you know, say for example, something like, oh, your work is derivative, like, you know, someone's going to say, oh, it reminds me of this stuff.

Like, when you look at the game designers or programmers, you know, like, you tell someone like, hey, you know, I read through your code and like, I found it fantastic and I just like, stole it, like, you know, I took these bits that you left on GitHub, like, seven years back. And they'll be like, oh, my God, you know, thank you. Someone actually read that.

Yeah, in the game world, I feel like that kind of thing is, it operates on a very different level. Like, people are very happy to share and they're very happy for you to use their systems and their storylines even. Yeah, there's a much different level of creation there, I guess. It's more focused on collaboration in some ways.

Like, you know, I mean, so that's programmers, but you'll see that with cooks as well. Like, you know, you'll see that with like engineers in general. Like, you know, like people who make things like sharing those, you know, like those.

Well, I guess like being able to, like, quoting each other or referencing each other. I'm thinking because we just we just wrapped a mini-series about collaboration and one of the things we were talking about was the types of social infrastructures that kind of artists require. And part of it is that sense of kind of who are the peers that you surround yourself with, which is also things like who are you quoting back to one another, what are your like shared points of reference, which I think for many of us is also like, where do you share points of critique of one another's works, kind of like visiting your peers' works and sort of making critique on that. And that not that necessarily being a negative thing, but more kind of the points at which you're able to have

the discussion. Like the critique isn't, it's bad.

The critique is, how do we discuss and create these kind of maybe shared moments of knowledge, or even this cognition that you're talking about, how do we kind of come to the point of bringing our knowledge together, or bringing our cognition to a point where we can, like this three legged creature in the game, move in the same direction.

Yeah, like, in fact, you know, I mean, if you think of like, you know, the entire like, endeavor of art as this game, you know, like, that we're all playing, right, like, you know, I mean, which doesn't, which doesn't really have any losers, right? The only way the game is played is by, by continuing the game, like, you add, like, another fold to the round, like, you know, in a certain way, and turn it, change it a little bit, like, you know, that's the only way to play it, like, you know, I mean, like, if you start seeing it that way, then it's, as opposed to this, like, kind of, you know, individualized kind of thing, that, like, it's not the Olympics, right? Like, it's not, it is this collective endeavor that, like, we are all kind of, like, enmeshed in, really, like, you know, I mean, like, something fundamental to what we are as human beings, right? I guess the game would only, like, kind of grow if we have more artists, like, you know, everyone, not in that, like, you know, kind of cookie-cutter way of, like, everyone's an artist, but, like, like, we create, like, without that distinction, that, like, particularly the idea of the contemporary, sort of, like, you know, silos, art. This is how art has continued since, like, the beginning of time, right? Like, you know, I mean, it is this, and then, but then it's sort of cut away from, like, this flow of, like, you know, just daily life. And then you have sort of narratives about, like, you know, art changing the world, and, like, you know, art as activism, art as, you know, art hyphen, another thing. Like, and those are things that art possibly cannot do, like, you know, especially if you see the way that the world is unfolding today, it's, you know, where we find ourselves in these, like, forever wars and, like, like, in the state of, like, you know, collapse on, like, you know, every front. Art was never really meant to, like, you know, kind of, like, fix these.

But it's more about, like, you know, and this is something my brother, Harmeet, it kind of reminds me time and time again, that, like, you know, it's about, like, kind of being through that, like, you know, I mean, like, kind of being through the, the kind of pain and the, like, you know, the long nights and the dark nights of the soul, like, you know, kind of sharing space through those. Hoping that we make it through, and if not, like, you know, at least we have the point.

So we're going to, we're going to use that as a moment to go into our third and final segment of Hallucination Stream. This is Illusion Access Rumour. See you back in a few minutes.

Extract 3: Rumour

Illusion Type Rumour

Location Ayodhya. Lit. the place that shall carry no conflict; one among the many terrestrial birth sites of Lord Ram.

Time Shaam-e-Abad. The evening after oblivion, the end of entropic time, 1992.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, as Western society began celebrating history’s end with all the carbonated jubilation of a well-shaken Coca-Cola, cable television arrived in India. With it, myth finally returned to the land of the living.

Yet the silent perturbations that led to this untimely return began even further back in time, in the year 1949. Two years into the greatest experiment in democracy the world has ever known, the people of India found themselves in a nation divided by the communal shibboleth of the Partition. Prime Minister Nehru was grappling with the founding idealism upon which the nation itself had been imagined, while his second-in-command, Sardar Vallabhai Patel, struggled to hold its precarious contours together.

The India that was born—as Nehru declared “at the stroke of the midnight hour”—was about to witness a collapse of myth, memory, and history, spiraling into the abyss of fundamentalism at 3 AM. On that darkest of nights, the newborn nation was met with ancient ghosts from the Mughal Empire. In 1526, Commander Mir Baqi oversaw the construction of the Babri Masjid, in Ayodhya, a Muslim shrine to honour Emperor Babur, the forerunner of the Mughal dynasty. Subsequently a rumour began to grow that the mosque was built upon the sacred birth ground of Ram himself.

Four centuries later, Ram, the seventh incarnation of the god Vishnu, would return to his birth place. On 23rd December 1949, a Muslim policeman named Hawaldar Abdul Barkat brought this godly return into the legal record by filing an FIR (First Information Report) claiming that he saw a “flash of lightning”, following which he caught a glimpse of an infant child locked inside the Babri Masjid. The alleged child soon vanished, leaving behind an idol of Ram in its place. This apparition mobilised the far-right forces of Hindutva, and in December of 1992, the mobs demolished the Babri Masjid in an effort to reclaim the mythical birthplace of Ram. The child who appeared in a flash of lightning was proclaimed to be Ram Lalla Virajmaan—the infant deity who would become chief litigant in the most divisive property dispute in human history.

Illusion Axis Man takes land, makes temple, takes land, breaks man.

Conversation

So welcome back again. We really hope you enjoyed that third and final installment of Hallucination Stream by Sahej Rahal. Sahej, I kind of want to move on a little bit to the language in this speculative fiction. You are obviously using this as a storytelling tool. And here, for us, I think you're applying the language of these national legends to discuss political figures from our recent past. I've seen Trump is mentioned in there among others. How does this kind of mythologizing affect our perception of these events or of these figures when we draw analogies between politicians and deities? Because it feels quite slippery, but I'm interested.

So, this idea of mythologizing political figures has been, that’s fundamental to power. Because power requires a narrative and it requires a performance. Like power only exists in its performance, really. I mean, this idea that power is something that you can actually have is meaningless. It's always power on over the other. Getting someone or something to do what you will. But then, that's all there is to it. And because it's so hollow by its very nature, it requires an exterior narrative to verify and solidify and ratify it. So you will have mythologies of these gods and these chosen figures. And then there is ideas that even if you don't look at the myths, say for example, engineers, they are already high up on the... Especially in India, if you are an engineer, you are way high up on the social hierarchy. You are sort of seen as this... Because you are far more intelligent than the rest of us. But that's not true. Look at what's happening in Silicon Valley or what tech pros are trying to sell us. It's completely like, almost like completely separated from everyday reality. In India, one of the really funny examples is like this app called betterhalf.ai, which is a matchmaking app. And the algorithm pairs you...

So the way it works is like you put your CV onto it. And it pairs you with people who kind of fit your pay grade and things like that. And the marketing around it is like, it's pairing people based on similar value systems. Where I'm going with this is like, essentially, power is nothing but a sort of fear response to the kind of uncertainty and the kind of insecurity that the world at large sort of throws at us. This kind of like, a overwhelming sense of being. And on a very fundamental level, like you know, not knowing what you're experiencing is yours alone or like, you know, are you sharing this reality? Like, I do feel like it's a primal kind of, it's a response to a very primal fear of like, you know, finding yourself alone in the universe.

So would you say that you're sort of being sort of sympathetic to these characters in your writing or?

I mean, I don't know about sympathy, but like, you know, I mean, and not just these characters, but like, so I was watching the Manosphere documentary, like, you know, and it's funny, but like after a point, you're just like feeling terrible for not just the guys on screen but like and their audiences, because they are, in the absence of someone giving them a hug when they needed one, they have decided to come up with these strange multi-level marketing schemes.

Everyone's just afraid.

But I think there's something, there's something kind of disarming of their power in saying that as well. It's sort of like recognizing, oh, your desire for this doesn't make you more or less masculine. Your desire for this just demonstrates how alone or how afraid or how much maybe you didn't receive love that you should have or wanted to receive at a certain age. It’s sort of, but that also feels like when you have someone who's being aggressive towards you, it's quite disarming to say, oh, that aggression is not about me, that's a reflection of you. That's kind of what you're saying in terms of maybe that type of sympathy becomes a disarming of that structure by reflecting it back on the person who's trying to enact the power. I think it's interesting when you have this point in particularly US politics where they try to disarm Trump's politics by saying, I feel so bad that he doesn't understand this. This is really upsetting.

That type of politics can also be kind of dismissive to the very real harm that his policies are enacting. But it starts to become a way to sort of shift the language back or if the language that we've usually been using to describe politics is becoming redundant, as it feels like it is now, it's sort of, I think, part of what this project is doing is how do we think about different points of language at which these discussions might have the sympathy which you’re describing.

I mean, you know, I see this idea of power and like, you know, the separation that it sort of creates between human beings as a, like the fundamental sort of rupture that where this entire thing sort of springs from, like the moment that that sort of separation happens, you'll find it in you every day, you know, I mean, you don't even need to look at geopolitics, like the moment you find yourself in a place where you're kind of, you know, separated from another human being, you, and these separations are sort of like, you know, there's something very fundamental to the way, like they're kind of built into language. In the way that like we articulate ourselves, the way that like we cognise ourselves, like, you know, I mean, like this is not to give like anyone a free pass or whatever, you know, but like, if you were to really think about like, you know, where does, like, where does power, like, that violence sort of stemmed from that darkness, or whatever you call it, like, you know, we're all harboring it, like, and that's something we need to confront, you know, like, I mean, the kind of immensity of the human experience is this, like, you know, the fact that like we are capable of, like, absolute beauty and absolute horror, like, that's unfolding in front of us today. So, you know, we are as much a shape of it as, you know, and that's kind of a darker idea to think about, like, you know, in the sense like we are, by just our very being and acting violence as well. I do think really that art can kind of get us through these, this impasse that like, you know, that the human experience sort of has endemic to it, you know, like art is that one faculty that allows us to kind of reach out literally, like, you almost natural way possible, it is capable of reaching that impasse and I have immense faith in that idea and it’s not a war yet.

I agree.

Yeah, thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you, Sahej. We're going to put your website and stuff in our show notes. And please let us know when the game is demo ready, because I personally, I know we would all love to play it. But yeah, let us know.

Yeah, and yeah, and we'll put the texts in, if you're happy, Sahej, for us to put it in the show notes so that listeners can either read along as they listen to it, if they want to listen to it a second time, and or if they want to do further reading after listening to the episode. And I guess on that note as well, do you have anything coming up in the future that you'd like people to kind of direct people to, any plugs you want to make?

I'm going to be starting at UCLA soon, so I'm really excited about that. I have a show that's opening in July in Sonsbeek, it's part of the Sculpture Exhibition in the Netherlands. And, oh, one more thing, I do want to plug. I have a, I have a starter project that I've made in Unreal. This is on my Instagram page. And I made a tutorial for it as well. And I'll share a link with you, so you can, like, you know, if you'd like to share it with the show. I've used it to make, like, literally everything I've made with Unreal so far. And I've tried to, like, design the project in a way that people who have never coded before can use it after watching a few tutorials.

Like, one tutorial is like a 10-minute video that I made.

Amazing.

So everyone can become a world shaper? Themselves. Yeah. So everyone can become their own digital sculptor?

That's great, Sahej. That's really great to offer that.

Oh, thank you.

Yeah. All righty. Well, we'll see everybody in our next episode. But thanks so much for listening.

Great.

Thanks. Thank you.

Bye.

Bye

Large Format Transcript

HALLUCINATION STREAM

Sahej Rahal

​​

Introduction

Artist Introduction

Extract 1: Simulation

Conversation

Extract 2: Story

Conversation

Extract 3: Rumour

Conversation