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# Sahej Rahal's Atithi interrupts our sense of touch
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-brass-plate-is-the-controller-in-sahej-rahals-atithi/
- Published: 2026-09-30T18:32:06.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-30T18:32:05.000Z
- Description: Touch-reactive engravings let visitors interrupt AI creatures roaming a ruined temple
- Author: Kill Screen Staff
- Tags: Sahej Rahal, Atithi, Basel Social Club, AI art, Installation, touch, simulation, Caldo Worldwide

Two engraved brass plates on wooden stands, a projection on the wall behind them. Drag a hand across the engraving and the creatures onscreen—tentacled, tripod-limbed things wandering the remains of an abandoned temple—swirl, sway and scatter. That was *Atithi*, Sahej Rahal’s interactive simulation, installed in a basement room during Basel Social Club’s run; [the documentation reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZINSJmqY4i/?ref=killscreen.com) from Caldo Worldwide, the Munich gallery that brought it, shows the whole loop in fifteen seconds.

Rahal’s [accompanying statement](https://caldo-worldwide.com/pages/sahej-rahal?ref=killscreen.com) takes aim at what touchscreens did to touch—a sense reduced to tapping and pinching against a black mirror—and insists on its full range: touch “is at once assertive, aggressive, aching, averse, affectionate, adoring, and aimless.” So the controller here is not a screen but a conductive drawing, and the creatures it interrupts are what Rahal calls mind-limbs, AI appendages where brain and body are enmeshed rather than stacked. The title is the Hindi word for guest or visitor—literally, the statement notes, a being of uncertain temporality.

![Atithi installed at EPFL Pavilions in Lausanne, with a touch-sensitive brass plate before a large projection](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/sahej-rahal-atithi-epfl.jpg)

**Atithi* at its 2025 debut in HALOS, EPFL Pavilions, Lausanne. Photo: Remy Ugarte Vallejos, via [Caldo Worldwide](https://caldo-worldwide.com/pages/sahej-rahal?ref=killscreen.com).

Basel Social Club is the anti-fair that occupies disused architecture during Art Basel week—this year a vacant Diener & Diener office building minutes from the train station—and there is something just so right about a ritual of extra-human cognition running in the basement of a dead paperwork machine. The work itself debuted in 2025 at EPFL Pavilions’ HALOS exhibition in Lausanne.

Rahal keeps orbiting through here for a reason. We covered [the AI instruments and cooperative creatures](https://www.killscreen.com/sahej-rahals-ai-instruments-and-cooperative-creatures/) last year and [*Azalabad*’s drowned village](https://www.killscreen.com/sahej-rahal-azalabad/) just last month—a practice that treats game engines as sites for myth-making rather than product. Rahal also joined UCLA’s Design Media Arts faculty this year, which means the next generation gets this worldview firsthand.

Artists who keep building playgrounds for machine minds are a Killscreen through-line, not a one-off. The free newsletter follows them show to show.

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