In the context of AI: Digital Twins and Data Doppelgängers, Zas Ieluhee presents the interactive installation Wùn Ná Kre as a proposition to rethink the relationship between our innermost selves and the ways they are captured through data doppelgängers. This work explores the unseen contracts of the contemporary digital age, framing the relationship between individuals and their data-doubles as a form of entanglement—an inescapable bond in which each holds the other in place. Framed as a promise of security, this imposed rigidity oftentimes demands humans oversimply the complexity of their experience. In a world where modernism inserts new modes of abstraction and fragmentation that alienate users from their contexts, what other role can digitalization and AI play than distancing humans from the messiness of life?  

The work engages in the histories of the Tirailleurs, and the social, spiritual, and material worlds that shaped their subjectivities while warfare rendered them mere machines. The work takes Serer mathematics as a foundation, rooted in the cosmogony of the Serer people of Senegambia, many of whom were Tirailleurs during the Second World War. Drawn from the Ghomálá language of West Cameroon, ‘Wùn Ná Kre’ is a phrase that can be both a command to walk the line (to conform) and a parent’s disciplinary threat, daring a child to disobey. In this artistic context, the saying becomes an invitation to sit with ambiguity and embrace uncertainty. Serer cosmogony revolves around the number three, which stand for the feminine principle underpinning creation—a story with three phases. In the installation, the first stage, the creation of the deep waters, where the spiritual world resides, is conveyed through the audio that anchors the work; a static sound halfway between ocean-floor rhythms and electronic ventilation hum. The second stage, the creation of the heavens and space (with stars like Yoonir), inspired the pre-activation visuals that appear on the screen. And lastly, the creation of swamps, cradles of humanity and life on Earth—such as the trees where Pangool (ancestral spirits) reside—inspired the vinyl prints creeping across the floor of the installation. Wùn Ná Kre is a critique of a world where human (and non-human) lives have become cornered by systems of control, and an incentive to ask: what happens when we stop  towing the line and focus on thriving instead? 

Interactive systems and visual programming by Lars Sorger