The exhibition draws from Sen’s text, which opens with a stark proposition: “Winter 2045 in Bengal is unforgiving: the climate is erratic, and artificial intelligence has slipped into the hands of transnational criminal networks. A call from a Western photo editor sends Ronny Sen in search of a peculiar wooden dog, apparently the first synthetic analog learning machine ever built in the 1940s as a covert weapon system, in case the Nazis used the nuclear bomb first.”The narrative follows the survival of the machine, now alongside a young boy: “The dog was designed to learn from its surroundings and serve any survivors of the so-called free world at the peak of World War II.It was deployed to numerous secret airfields newly built on the eastern edge of the British Empire for the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) and the Royal Air Force (RAF).The aircraft that would later drop the nuclear bombs on Japan were operational earlier in these very airfields, where the first B-29 bombers began arriving.He[Sen]travels to these sites, nowabandonedfor over a century, because the military-industrial complex must understand what happened to the first prototypes of these analog AI machines. Miraculously, he finds one intact, almost indistinguishable from a real dog, now a companion to a sixteen-year-old boy in the ruins.” The journey culminates in a startling discovery and lingering question, “What has the dog really learned over more than a century, and what is it doing with this boy in the middle of nowhere?” Blurring research, fiction, and image-making, the work reflects on the afterlives of technology and the uneasy relationship between learning systems and human survival.The exhibition catalogue will feature a new text by Ronny Sen.