KINDASA (كنداسة – derived from latin “condensare”)
The first robot was a 12th-century musical band.
A water-operated programmable drum machine with wooden pegs and levers that controlled percussion. The drummers could be made to play different rhythms and patterns simply by rearranging the pegs. This ‘robot band’ could perform more than fifty facial and body actions during each musical selection.
Ismail Al-Jazari invented and recorded over 100 devices, shaping the foundations of mechanical engineering. Thanks to the centuries-long Translation Movement and vibrant trade and cultural relations, he built his work upon Egyptian, Greek, Persian, Indian, and Chinese engineering.
The result was water-operated clocks (for worshippers to know the prayer times), perpetual flute machines, drum machines, fountains, hand washing devices, and machines for raising water from ponds, rivers, and flowing canals, the crankshaft (essential to all modern piston and car engines), the flushing mechanism, multi-dial combination locks and many more.
Like Al-Jazari’s clocks and musical automata, I compose using mechanical descriptions without timelines, grids, or fixed BPMs. Instead, I weave sets of rules to build a “musical-visual automaton” for each scene to unfold dynamically.
Through these rules, I simulate and regulate rhythms, visuals, movement and progression procedurally—sometimes in feedback loops. Moving arms, blinking, eye contact or avoidance, birds, sky, wind, gravity, physics, time… all carefully woven together.
The rest is intuition.
Why this process?
While AI is becoming a bigger part of music and art, it’s not the only path forward.
I’m interested in a “handmade”, human centric kind of generative systems—one that doesn’t predict outcomes based on massive data, and unfolds in real time. While I have other wonderful uses for AI, my process in Kindasa simply isn’t about optimization and production speed, but a slower, parallel approach to technology and especially generative art; an invitation to explore deeper what is already available to us.
To create these systems, I find myself analysing real-world patterns—how people move and navigate space, how they make or avoid eye contact in public, how movement and rhythm emerge. Describing, programming, and even distorting these behaviours isn’t about perfect reconstruction or hyper-realism but about observing them in a new way.
These ideas aren’t new. They echo earlier ways of thinking about machines and generative art, from Al-Jazari’s automata to pre-digital systems of procedural composition.
Now, I’m using Unreal Engine’s Object-Oriented Programming—built to mimic real-world mechanics—which I’ve also used as a research assistant for training robots’ “common sense” at the Institute for AI in Bremen from 2018-2020.
I keep coming back to the idea that technology and art evolve together in loops rather than straight lines.
++ Notes ++
The Graeco-Arabic translation movement was a large, well-funded, and sustained effort responsible for translating a significant volume of secular Greek texts into Arabic. The translation movement took place in Baghdad from the mid-eighth century to the late tenth century.
While the movement translated from many languages into Arabic, including Pahlavi, Sanskrit, Syriac, and Greek, it is often referred to as the Graeco-Arabic translation movement because it was predominantly focused on translating the works of Hellenistic scholars and other secular Greek texts into Arabic.
Aristotle depicted in the Kitāb naʿt al-hayawān manuscript (13th century)
The unknown compiler ( jāmiʿ) of this book says:
“When I read what the sage Aristotle said in his book on the characteristics of animals and found that he had not mentioned their usefulness I wanted to add what has been mentioned by the sage ʿUbayd Allāh ibn Jibrāʾīl ibn Bakhtīshūʿ on the usefulness of animals to make this book complete. I began it with the book by Aristotle and I finished it with the book by Ibn Bakhtīshūʿ. Everything quoted from Aristotle is Naʿt and everything quoted from Ibn Bakhtīshūʿ is Manfaʿ.”
Al-Kindasa – Jeddah
