HALOS

ETHS x mudac Solar Biennale
Sahej Rahal & Emilia Tapprest
EPFL Pavilions – Pavilion A
06.06 – 29.06.2025

OPENING HALOS – 05.06.2025
6 pm – EPFL Pavilions – Pavilion A
In the presence of the artists.

Dates of the exhibition: 06.06–29.06.2025
Tuesday to Sunday: 11 am – 6 pm

HALOS 

Organized in conjunction with the second Solar Biennale presented by mudac and titled Soleil·s, the exhibition HALOS premieres two new productions: अतिथि | Atithi by Sahej Rahal and Interspecies Interfaces (Part II) – Shape of Language by Emilia Tapprest, realized in dialogue with the EPFL scientific community.

From the spring equinox to the autumn equinox of 2025, mudac will host the second Solar Biennale with the exhibition Soleil·s in the Plateforme 10 arts district and on the EPFL campus. Launched in 2022 in the Neth­er­lands by design­ers Pauline van Dongen and Marjan van Aubel, the Solar Bien­nale provides a plat­form for reflec­tions on the chal­lenges of solar energy. For this second edition, mudac will broaden the theme by bring­ing together design­ers, curat­ors, activ­ists, and research­ers to explore expan­ded perspect­ives on how to approach ecolo­gical trans­ition.

HALOS continues the itinerary of From Solar to Nocturnal, advancing its inquiry into “other suns” to question a solar-centric hierarchy of perception. Just as transitioning to solar and alternative energy sources requires new ways of thinking and designing, reimagining cultural and technological approaches to perceiving the more-than-human world demands a shift in human consciousness. HALOS immerses visitors in a world where artificial intelligence serves as a medium to rethink our bond with the living and the non-human. The exhibition delves into non-verbal intelligences whose cognition unfolds through touch, movement, and atmospheres. Through machinic memory, sensory contact, and interspecies interfaces, HALOS creates spaces where the boundaries between human, animal, and technology dissolve, making room for new forms of shared perception and interconnected existence.

अतिथि | Atithi by Sahej Rahal is an immersive and interactive installation that explores a form of non-human cognition centered on sensory interaction and touch. The word “atithi” means “visitor” in Hindi, but it also refers to a being outside of linear time, unbound by fixed beginnings or endings. In the work, AI-driven tentacles wander through the ruins of an abandoned temple. Each tentacle is a creature that acts as both body and brain, a hybrid of mind and flesh, forming a quasi-sentient collective entity. Visitors can interact with them by touching conductive plates: each tactile gesture triggers a movement-based response from the AI tentacles, creating a nonverbal, haptic dialogue. Every touch performed becomes an utterance to which the creatures respond by swirling, swaying, and scattering in an extra-linguistic conversation across the porous boundaries of myth, machine, mind, and memory.

In a time when artificial intelligence is increasingly applied to “decode” animal communication, Interspecies Interfaces (Part II) – Shape of Language by Emilia Tapprest  interrogates the dominant framing of interspecies understanding as a matter of verbal translation. The film investigates how ambient technologies—interfaces that communicate through continuous sensory representations—might open up alternative ways to conduct research on more-than-human minds. Developed in close collaboration with creative technologist Sakander Zirai and composer Studio Øraya, the narration follows a team of scientists trying to map the collective cognitive landscape of eight lab-born fruit bats. As the study unfolds, the scientists find themselves navigating an emergent cognitive field where agency is diffused, and distinctions between human, bat, and machine intelligence begin to dissolve. Grounded in emerging approaches in consciousness research, such as 4E cognition and hyperscanning methods, the inquiry presents a quiet critique of reductionist models of mind, asking whether shared consciousness might emerge through sustained coherence between multiple beings—even across species. Visitors are invited to rehearse unfamiliar modes of perception in an installation that combines an actual ambient neural data display with experimental sound and cinematic depictions of possible futures in scientific research.

^{© Sahej Rahal, अतिथि | Atithi, 2025
Commissioned and produced by the EPFL CDH AiR Program 2024/2025: Enter the Hyper-Scientific, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne EPFL.}

^{© Emilia Tapprest, Interspecies Interfaces (Part II) – Shape of Language, 2025
Commissioned and produced by the EPFL CDH AiR Program 2024: Enter the Hyper-Scientific, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne EPFL with additional support from the Mondriaan Fund.}