Machinic Echoes of a Marking

An inquiry into the interpretive labour of language as it attempts to make the ineffable legible to a machine.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Over the coming months, the project will unfold as a living study of translation, perception, and the thresholds between silence, language, and machinic legibility.