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.
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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.
Machinic Echoes: Classroom Iteration
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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.
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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.
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Enter the Classroom Iteration to view the full set of student responses and generated images.
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Machinic Echoes continues as an open, evolving inquiry into how marks are read, described, and translated across human and machinic systems.
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Visitors are invited to participate in the experiment by responding to a drawing with their own description. These texts will be used to generate new machinic images, extending the project through diverse perceptual and linguistic frames.
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You can submit your description here to continue the experiment.
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There is no correct way to describe the work. What matters is attention—what you notice, how you choose to name it, and what remains unresolved.
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Selected responses may be added to the project archive as it grows.​
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Note: Submissions may be edited only for clarity; meaning will not be altered.
