At a warehouse turned arts campus in Abu Dhabi’s Mina Zayed port district, a robotics engineer has built something that cannot quite decide what it is: a game, an installation, a philosophical proposition suspended from the ceiling in coloured rope.
Dr. Ahmad AlAttar is 32 years old, holds a PhD from Imperial College London in robot motion learning, and works by day as a senior robotics engineer at Dubai Future Labs. In the evenings, or whenever the boundary between those two lives grows sufficiently porous, he makes art. Human in the Loop, his first institutional solo exhibition at 421 Arts Campus, is the most direct expression yet of a practice that has been quietly assembling itself at the intersection of mechatronics and cultural inquiry.
The show runs until 13 September 2026 and occupies the gallery with a forest of suspended ropes in vivid colours, each one responsive to touch. Pull one and it produces sound: early on, something close to birdsong or rainfall; persist, and the tones shift toward the electronic, the synthetic, the unmistakably machinic. Somewhere within this field, an algorithm is hiding. Find the correct rope and the system rewards you with a heightened audio response before relocating, beginning the search again. It is genuinely difficult to say at what point the playfulness tips into something more unsettling.
“People often ask whether I am an artist or an engineer,” AlAttar says. “For me, the two are closely connected. Experimentation is how I work.” The question he set himself at the outset was deceptively simple: who is really in control? The installation does not answer it so much as stage it, repeatedly, for each new visitor who walks in.
The title borrows from engineering terminology. In robotics and artificial intelligence, a human in the loop system is one that requires ongoing human input to function, a corrective presence that prevents full automation. AlAttar takes that functional phrase and turns it into something far less comfortable. Here, the human is in the loop, yes, but the loop itself keeps moving.
421 Arts Campus, formerly known as Warehouse421, has operated since 2015 as a platform for emerging practitioners in the UAE. Its Artistic Development Program, through which Human in the Loop was produced during the 2024 cycle, provides mentorship, production support, and institutional guidance to artists working in the region. For AlAttar, who has spent most of his career in engineering research environments, it offered something less tangible but perhaps more necessary: permission to treat a gallery as a laboratory.
Faisal Al Hassan, Director of 421 Arts Campus, describes the exhibition as a milestone, noting that it brings together AlAttar’s expertise in robotics with a sustained interest in human and machine relationships. That interest, in AlAttar’s telling, predates the art entirely. His doctoral research at Imperial College concerned how robots learn to move, how they adapt their behaviour in response to new information. The gallery installation is, in a sense, a version of that question made visible and physical and available to anyone willing to reach for a rope.
What the show does particularly well is resist didacticism. There are no lengthy wall texts explaining what algorithms are or why you should be concerned about them. The concern, if it comes, arrives through the body: through the slightly competitive instinct to find the right rope, through the mild frustration of watching the system reset, through the gradual recognition that your own behaviour has been shaped, moment by moment, by a set of rules you cannot see.
AlAttar is also the founder of REALIITY, an Emirati art and technology practice that develops immersive and interactive installations, and a member of the inaugural cohort of the MBZUAI AI x Arts Fellowship. He is, in other words, operating across several registers at once, research, commerce, institution, gallery, which may explain why his work feels less like a comment on technology and more like a demonstration of what it actually feels like to live inside it.
The ropes hang in the Abu Dhabi heat until September. The algorithm keeps moving. The game, as ever, continues.
Human in the Loop is on view at 421 Arts Campus, Mina Zayed, Abu Dhabi, until 13 September 2026. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 8pm.
