MACHINIC ECHOES OF A MARKING
Machinic Echoes of a Marking
An inquiry into the interpretive labour of language as it attempts to make the ineffable legible to a machine.
Mohammed Chiba’s intervention within Down the Rabbit Hole begins from an interior terrain — a practice anchored in drawing, writing, and the slow work of noticing what arises before language forms. Rather than building images from intention or narrative, Chiba allows perception to surface in its diffuse, pre-verbal state. His drawings take shape as traces of that awareness: not symbols to decode, but manifestations of a consciousness moving without instruction.
Within the pavilion, this inward gesture expands outward into a study of interpretation itself. The viewer becomes an active participant, asked to translate these unmoored marks into prompts for a machine. What emerges through this act is less a test of AI’s ability to reproduce an image and more a revelation of our own habits of naming — what we emphasize, what we ignore, what we stabilise when confronted with ambiguity.
Chiba positions this interplay between the intuitive and the constructed as the real site of inquiry. The work examines how intelligence — human or machinic — is continually shaped by the frames we impose: categories, descriptions, and the linguistic scaffolding we rely on to make sense of the felt world. In sharing his drawings ahead of the experiment itself, the pavilion enters his process at its most vulnerable stage, where marks exist without task or target.
Over the coming months, the project will unfold as a living study of translation, perception, and the thresholds between silence, language, and machinic legibility.
Machinic Echoes: Classroom Iteration
As part of Machinic Echoes of a Marking, Mohammed Chiba worked with his sixth-grade students in Bilbao to test how marks are read, described, and re-imagined.
Beginning with one of Chiba’s original drawings, students were invited to describe what they perceived. Their fourteen responses were used verbatim as prompts for an image-generation system. What emerges is a chain of translation—from mark to perception, from language to machine vision—where description itself becomes an active, creative force.
Enter the Classroom Iteration to view the full set of student responses and generated images.
Machinic Echoes unfolded as an open, evolving inquiry into how marks are read, described, and translated across human and machinic systems.
From January to March, visitors were invited to respond to three selected original artworks by Mohammed Chiba with their own descriptions. These texts were used to generate machinic images, extending the project through diverse perceptual and linguistic frames.
What emerges here is a selection from those submissions—tracing how attention, language, and interpretation shape what a mark becomes when translated.
Select responses and generated images can be viewed here.
There is no correct way to describe the work. What mattered was attention—what one noticed, how they choose to name it, and what remains unresolved.
Note: Submissions (texts) have been preserved in their original form. Minor edits have been made only where required for clarity.
