Amrita Sethi: SoundSCAPES – Presents of Sound

Amrita Sethi. Yes, beautifully. The image of one ray entering a prism and emerging as four states is very close to how I think about Presents of Sound. A single intention—a breath, a rotational gesture, a sonic movement—enters the work, and what comes out depends entirely on the medium it passes through.

What I would gently add: in physics, the four beams emerge simultaneously. In Presents of Sound they share a source—XX / XX / 1—but they live in different tenses.

And then I find myself wanting to push it further—from prism to quantum field.

Amrita Sethi. In quantum field theory, a particle does not exist as a fixed point until it is observed. Before observation it exists as a wave of probability—all states simultaneously real. The act of looking collapses the wave into a single dot. A position. A fact. A present moment made real through contact.

This is the structural logic of the work. The sonic gesture begins as a wave—potential, multiple, undecided. The moment it touches a surface, the wave collapses. It becomes a dot. A mark. A present moment made irreversibly real through observation. Through presence.

What moves me most is what it reveals about identity. We are not fixed selves standing outside the flow of time. Every present moment that passes through us collapses something potential into something permanently real—and adds to the pattern that gradually becomes who we are. Identity is not decided. It is accumulated. The dot is where the wave became real. The line is every dot that came before. The wave is what we became from the sum of all of them.

Presents of Sound is about making that invisible process visible—through sound, through gesture, through mark—because sound is the one art form that proves the present moment exists. It arrives. And it is already gone. Just like us.

Amrita Sethi. Cats don’t make dogs. Humans made AI to replicate themselves—which means AI is not the beginning of something new. It is the continuation of something ancient. Humans are the original AI machines.

We are the sum of our present moments, our experiences, our conscious and subconscious impulses—but also the sum of what came before us. Every human being alive is running on training data that stretches back through generations. We did not choose our first language, our first images of beauty, our first understanding of what is sacred. We inherited them.

What we are now doing with AI is capturing that process explicitly for the first time. When someone types a prompt into an AI system, the specific words they choose, the images they reach for all of that is data about who they are. The machine is not just a tool. It is a form of collective self-portrait.

Amrita Sethi. This is why identity is at the centre of my practice. My first collection — A Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures — began from a simple observation: if you say one word to a hundred different people, you will get a hundred different images. Because every one of us is a different AI machine, operating on different learned experience, different inherited culture, different accumulated present moments.

The installation is built in TouchDesigner, and its logic can be said in one sentence: the music moves the dot. There are no waves or lines drawn by hand. The frequency of the sonic movements shifts the dot—its position, its colour, its intensity. As the music builds, lines emerge not because I drew them but because the sound demanded them. Waves form as the physical consequence of intensity meeting time. Exactly how identity forms. Not by design. By accumulation.

Then I add movement. When people enter the space and dance or gesture, a second dot structure appears, generated entirely by their bodies. Two systems—sonic and kinetic — exist simultaneously in the same visual field, each generating its own geometry, each influencing the other. The room becomes a drawing instrument.

What AI makes possible is the next step: programming it to collect data from real-time movement and feed it back into the system continuously, so the installation builds a memory of the room. Over four days at Art Dubai, the work would become something different on the final afternoon than it was on the first morning—shaped by every body that passed through it.

I am a Swiss-Kenyan-Indian-British artist living in Dubai. I had no conventional musical training. AI gave me access to a creative capacity I would otherwise have been locked out of. And I think that is the most important thing AI is doing right now—not replacing human creativity but returning it to people who were told they were not creative. We are all creative beings. The question was never whether. The question was access.

Each state is a different language for the same intention. And each can pronounce things the others cannot.

Amrita Sethi. The physical original can say irreversibility. Rice paper bruises under the brush in a way that cannot be undone. The wave collapsed here, in this specific way, because of this specific gesture in this specific present moment. But a still work is also fixed—it captures one collapsed state of something that was, in the moment of making, entirely fluid. The physical work holds the past perfectly. What it cannot hold is the living frequency that created it.This is where augmented reality enters — not as a gimmick, but as access to another dimension. As human beings we can see length, width, depth.

We experience time but we cannot see it. We know that objects carry invisible histories and frequencies — but our perceptual apparatus cannot access them. AR changes that. When you point your phone at a physical work and the surface opens—when the still image begins to move, when the sonic composition fills the air—you are not watching a special effect. You are accessing a dimension that was always there but invisible.

The quantum logic holds perfectly here. The AR dimension exists as potential until you observe it. The moment you raise your phone and look, you collapse the wave. You are the observer whose presence makes the invisible visible.

The phygital twin can say simultaneity. It exists in two states at once—physical and perpetual, singular and accessible. It is the only state that refuses to choose between the wave and the dot.

The performance can say pure collapse. This is happening now, in this room, between these bodies—and when it ends the wave will not return. You cannot revisit it. You can only have been present for it.

The live-generative installation can say collective identity. When people enter the space, their movements and presences combine into a field the system has never encountered before. The work that emerges is a portrait of a now that will never exist again.

None of them, alone, can say the whole sentence. The still work holds what has already become. The augmented dimension holds what was always becoming. The performance holds what is becoming right now. The live-generative installation holds what has not yet decided what it will become. Four tenses. One source.

Amrita Sethi. I did not arrive at this work through intellectual curiosity. I arrived through complete loss of control of my own body.

I built a career in banking—a mathematical world where every variable could be modelled and every outcome projected. And then it didn’t work. Thirteen years. Over twenty IVF attempts. No matter how precisely I controlled every variable, my body would not do the one thing I asked of it. There is no mathematical model for that.

What I discovered—slowly, painfully, and then with a strange and unexpected freedom—is that the future does not exist. Not as a place. Not as a certainty. The future is nothing but our imagination. And the past we call memory is also a construction—we each remember the same event differently, because we are each running on different accumulated experience. The past is our imagination of what happened.

What remains when you remove both? Only this. The present moment. The dot.

This did not arrive as philosophy. It arrived as survival. I had been a black and white line—precise, contained. In the space that loss created I became something else. A colourful dot, discovering for the first time the full range of what I was capable of making.

Which is why gold runs through this entire collection. Gold is globally recognised across every culture and every era. It does not corrode. It does not diminish. In this work it represents the present moment — the only thing we actually have, the only thing whose value never depreciates. The present is a gift. And what is the highest value gift one human being can offer another? Gold.

Amrita Sethi. The work begins where most art now begins—digitally. In a live generative installation where sound becomes image in real time, where the frequency of the music moves the dot, where the movement of bodies in the space generates its own geometry. The digital is the origin. The source.

Amrita Sethi. From that live digital experience I capture moments—freeze frames of a process that was never still—and these become the physical prints. We are the first generation for whom the digital world is not a representation of reality but the place where reality increasingly begins. The physical object is now the arrival point, not the departure. The print on the wall is evidence that something alive happened somewhere. The wave collapsed into a dot. The living thing became permanent.

Then the augmented layer completes the circle. Point your phone at the image through Artivive and the physical print opens. The video plays over the surface. The sonic movement fills the air. The work that began as live digital, collapsed into physical, now comes alive again in the present moment of your specific viewing. Digital to physical to digital again. The same intention passing through different states of matter, arriving each time in your now.

I know how that sounds. It has been repeated so many times it has lost its edges. But I spent thirteen years and over twenty IVF attempts learning what it actually means—not as philosophy, but as the only thing left standing after everything I thought I could control turned out to be imagination.

The present moment is not a consolation. It is the only real thing that has ever existed. Every past moment was once a present moment. Every future moment will arrive as a present moment. It is the only place where anything actually happens.

The gold that runs through every work is the answer I found. The present moment is the highest value thing that exists. It does not corrode. It does not diminish. You already have the most valuable thing in the world. You are living inside it right now.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​