Human in the Loop – a new sound-and-string exhibition opens in Abu Dhabi

A field of coloured ropes hangs from the ceiling of a gallery in Mina Zayed, and the room is waiting for you to touch it. This is Human in the Loop, the new installation by Emirati artist and robotics engineer Dr Ahmad AlAttar, on at 421 Arts Campus. Pull gently on a rope and it answers with sound. Keep pulling, move through the space, and the answers begin to form a pattern – until you realise you are playing hide-and-seek with an algorithm.

The rules reveal themselves slowly, which is the point. A calm soundscape of nature fills the room; each pull on a rope interrupts it with a brief, glitch-like sound. At first the responses feel random, but with repetition a logic emerges – a faint glitch means the algorithm is far off, a sharper, more distorted one means you are closing in. When the “correct” rope is found, the space answers with a heightened burst of sound and light, before the system relocates and the search begins again. The work never settles, and neither do you.

The title borrows a term from robotics and artificial intelligence. A “human in the loop” is a system that depends on human input to function – a person kept inside the decision-making process rather than left outside it. AlAttar takes the phrase off the whiteboard and gives it a body: visitors are not observers but components, each tug feeding the algorithm and shaping what it does next. Beneath the play sits a question about the systems most of us move through every day, often without noticing how they steer our attention.

That ambiguity is deliberate. The piece started, AlAttar says, from a simple question – “who is really in control?” He would rather visitors arrive at it through experience than have it explained to them; the installation opens as something playful and only later turns reflective.

AlAttar (b. 1994, Dubai) is an unusual figure to be holding a first institutional solo show. Trained as a mechatronics engineer, he holds a PhD in robotics from Imperial College London, where his research centred on how robots learn to move, and he works as a senior robotics engineer at Dubai Future Labs. He also founded REALIITY, an Emirati art-and-technology studio, and sits in the first cohort of the AI x Arts Fellowship at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. The split identity – engineer or artist – is one he declines to resolve, treating experimentation as the common ground between the two.

The exhibition is the culmination of his year in 421’s Artistic Development Program, an annual scheme that supports UAE-based artists with mentorship and production help. AlAttar developed the work with facilitator Jolaine Frizzell and mentors Khalid AlAwadhi and Dr Pradeep Sharma, moving it from an initial concept into his most ambitious piece to date. Faisal Al Hassan, the campus director, frames the result as a meeting of AlAttar’s robotics expertise and his long interest in how people and machines relate.

421 Arts Campus was Founded in 2015 as Warehouse421 inside a converted warehouse in Mina Zayed, it has grown into one of Abu Dhabi’s more independent-minded spaces for emerging artists, with galleries, studios and a public plaza given over to film, performance and talks. Human in the Loop runs until 13 September, Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 8pm.