Human in the Loop: A New Sound-and-String Exhibition Opens in Abu Dhabi

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

A Term Borrowed from the Lab

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. As he put it in a recent interview, the first encounter with the work might be confusing, but once a visitor learns how the system behaves, they can find themselves following it almost without noticing.

From a Basement to a Gallery Floor

AlAttar's mentor on the project, facilitator Jolaine Frizzell, has described the work's intent plainly: it is not a warning about technology so much as an invitation to notice how it operates on us. That framing matters, because the installation itself grew out of years of quiet experimentation rather than a single idea arriving fully formed. Early tests reportedly began with a single rope in AlAttar's basement, before expanding into a sixteen-rope prototype; at 421, the concept has become a fully immersive environment shaped by the gallery's own architecture — by some accounts, his most ambitious piece to date.

An Engineer's Route into Art

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 — work that included teaching a robotic arm to grasp for the first time, much as an infant might. He works as a senior robotics engineer at Dubai Future Labs, where he leads advanced robotics research and contributes to the development of the emirate's wider innovation ecosystem. 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.

Developed Through 421's Artistic Development Programme

The exhibition is the culmination of his year in 421's Artistic Development Programme, 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, founder and CEO of Remal, and Dr Pradeep Sharma, director of the Arts, Culture and Heritage programme at the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation. Faisal Al Hassan, the campus director, frames the result as a meeting of AlAttar's robotics expertise and his long-standing interest in how people and machines relate — describing the show as a milestone for the institution as much as for the artist.

About the Venue

421 Arts Campus was founded in 2015 as Warehouse421 inside a converted warehouse in Mina Zayed, and 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.