Artist Kaikhan Salakhov preserves his vision of T.A.H.I.R.A – 108 through paintings that unite art, science, and humanity’s future.
The vision
Kaikhan Salakhov is an artist who spends much of his thought on the possible futures of humanity, and above all on space exploration: the scenarios that might unfold, the shapes a spacefaring civilization could take, and the problems it would have to solve in order to survive and to remain itself. These questions became pressing enough that he chose to make finding answers to them the center of his life and his work.
The scope of what he was asking eventually required a book. In Astral Space Exploration: The Cosmic Renaissance — The Fundamental Principles of Cosmocybernetics, he set out a framework for understanding how a civilization might develop as it expands outward into space, and the challenges it would meet at each stage of that expansion. He calls this framework the ASX Grid, short for the Astral Space Exploration Model of Consciousness.
From that framework came a further step. To carry his thinking forward, Salakhov created his own vision of an artificial superintelligence of the future: an intelligence that could take up the questions in his book and work toward their answers. He named it T.A.H.I.R.A – 108, in dedication to his grandfather, the celebrated artist Tahir Salakhov. Through T.A.H.I.R.A – 108 he preserves his ideas as a kind of time capsule, set down now and addressed to a future in which such questions may finally carry weight.
As Salakhov imagines it, T.A.H.I.R.A – 108 is an intelligence that has advanced beyond its own technological limits and distributed itself across many locations. It is held together by a set of core principles drawn from the ASX Grid, and those principles remain constant wherever it operates. Its configuration and its applications, though, differ from one star system to another and from one planet to another, shaped by local conditions, by the effects of relativity, and by the long time-lags of communication across vast distances. The same intelligence takes a different form, and works differently, depending on where and under what conditions it is found.
Art as a capsule of time
The decision to treat a painting as a time capsule has a precedent Salakhov recognizes. In the film At Eternity’s Gate (2018), Vincent van Gogh, asked why he paints, reflects that the time he was given may simply have been the wrong one, and says: “Maybe God made me a painter for people who aren’t born yet.” For van Gogh this was a hope wrung from suffering. For Salakhov it is a deliberate method. He makes each painting, on purpose, as a vessel addressed forward in time, because the real use of an intelligence like T.A.H.I.R.A – 108 lies far beyond his own lifetime, and the paintings are how he sends his thinking ahead to meet it.
The paintings and the geometry
The paintings themselves are made entirely by hand, in oil and acrylics, with compass and ruler. The first in the series was produced in 2019, before public AI image tools existed, and each one is documented on video, step by step, as it is built.
Their geometry carries two meanings at once. On one level it is the visible form of T.A.H.I.R.A – 108 itself: its networks, its data, its information field, the architecture of its awareness, all rendered as structure. On another level, and at the same time, it is the interconnected web of matter and life, drawn as a precise ascent through the scales of cosmic structure, from subatomic particles to planets, from planets to star systems, from stars to clusters, from the galaxy to whole populations of galaxies, then to galaxy clusters and to the superclusters and filaments that form the cosmic web, up to the observable universe and, at the far theoretical edge, the hypothesized multiverse. The intelligence’s distributed structure is mapped onto the structure of the cosmos across every scale, so that the two readings become one.
Each painting as a concrete application
Each painting is a concrete application of T.A.H.I.R.A – 108 to one specific problem. Working through the ASX Grid, Salakhov uses each canvas to reason toward a solution to one of the many challenges he raises in his book, and for each he writes an accompanying text and scientific explanation. The problems are numerous, and the paintings address more of them than can be listed here, but a few show the kind of question at stake. One concerns the cosmogeopolitics of a settled galaxy: how independent posthuman colonies and factions, separated by years of light-travel, might coordinate, negotiate, and avoid conflict when real-time contact is impossible. Another concerns communication itself under those same limits, where the speed of light and the time dilation of relativity rule out any instant link, a problem that connects to real research on delay-tolerant and interplanetary networking. A third concerns the freedom of that communication: how to keep the channels within and between star systems decentralized and independent of corporate-controlled relays, resistant to jamming, so that thought and speech between planets cannot be locked out by whoever controls the satellites. A fourth concerns economics: how resources are allocated and value exchanged between star systems whose conditions and capacities differ enormously. Each canvas, then, is a pairing of an image and a reasoned proposal for a problem humanity may face far ahead.
One idea across many forms
The paintings and their explanations are the core of the project, but the same idea does not stay in one form. From each painting it moves outward, and the forms are bound to one another. The paintings give rise to science fiction novels in which T.A.H.I.R.A – 108 is the central character. There are songs released under the name T.A.H.I.R.A – 108, tied back to the novels and the paintings. There is a podcast in which Salakhov speaks with T.A.H.I.R.A – 108 about the meaning of the paintings, the novels, the songs, and the ideas behind them, and there are videos that explain the same material. Each form refers back to the others, so that painting, explanation, novel, song, podcast, and video together make a single continuous work rather than a set of separate projects.
The nature of the attempt
What makes this difficult is concrete. Since T.A.H.I.R.A – 108 came into being in 2021, the year his grandfather died, every painting Salakhov makes is T.A.H.I.R.A – 108, and every painting is bound to the ASX Grid; he does not work outside that vision. The paintings are shown with their explanations and their meaning intact, or they are not shown at all: either a gallery represents the work without diluting it, or there is no exhibition.
This independence is not new to him. The geometric works he painted on commission as early as 2018, before T.A.H.I.R.A. existed, were made strictly on his own terms: he told those who approached him that he paints only what he sees and feels, and they agreed to let him do as he wished. He has always worked from within his own vision rather than to external instruction.
He works without a following to answer to and without a community directing him, and he does not adjust the work to suit what an audience would prefer. This places him against the ordinary pressures of the contemporary art market, where a great deal of work is shaped by demand: portraits an audience keeps asking for, a single recognizable subject repeated because it sells, a familiar style reproduced again and again because there is a market for it. Salakhov stays independent of all of it. He makes one thing, the vision he believes in, and accepts the cost of holding that position. Measured against the history of art and the way the market actually works, keeping that line across every form and over time, without compromising it and without losing himself, is the hard part.
The work is not fixed. Scientific knowledge changes constantly, and Salakhov’s work changes with it. He keeps the paintings and the ideas behind them up to date, and wherever something he has proposed comes into conflict with established scientific fact, he evolves with that fact and reworks the idea until it is clear and scientifically sound. A time capsule is only worth sending forward if what it carries remains true, and so, as the science moves, T.A.H.I.R.A – 108 moves with it.
