I am a multidisciplinary artist, and machine learning engineer from Lebanon and the UK.
I work with movement, code, 3D modeling, and material, and I am interested in raw emotion and play. I explore how technology shapes identity and perception, and I use play to connect, experiment and expand our perspectives. My practice is driven by questions of queer belonging and a need to build ecosystems that hold multiplicity and difference.
I have collaborated on immersive installations with numerous artists, Jazmin Morris on TRex Dreams of Mangoes and Figs, exploring technological access, waiting in digital spaces, and consciousness; and Zach Blas on installations such as Cultus (Arebyte, Secession), Profundior (Berlin Biennale), and The Doors (Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, De Young Museum, Van Abbemuseum). These works examine consciousness expansion, human/machine relations, and AI religiosity, interrogating the extractive data practices underlying AI's rapidly advancing emotional intelligence.
I am co-founder of Disruptive Nostalgia, a collective which sets out to reimagine and challenge the narratives of architecture, landscape, and cultural memory informed by intersectional politics. The collective is currently resident at Spreepark in Berlin where they explore how memory, color, and play shape our understanding of place and connection to each other and nature.
I completed a Master's in Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge in August 2017.
art residencies
Rupert Alternative Education Program (2025), Vilnius, Lithuania
Scattered Minds — short film / coded animation exploring multiplicity of the mind
How Do I Dance? / Where Do I Go? (2025) — new media art installation with animated archeological relics, part of the Onland Loop Art Critique 17th Public Activation
Ecological Dialogues — ongoing research, workshop and collective choreography on movement, play and technology
artwork and commissions
When T-Rex Dreams of Mangoes and Figs with Jazmin Morris (2024) — commissioned by Mediale, and exhibited with Videocity UK at Tyneside Cinema (Newcastle), with Forum Sudutpandang at Kongsi 8 (Jakarta) and Marlah! Hub (Palu), at Modal Gallery (SODA, Manchester), Mozilla Festival 2025 (Barcelona), Peckham Digital (London) and Adventures in Consciousness (University of Oxford)
Infrastructures of AI (2025) — accepted for presentation at the Connective (t)Issues Workshop, with Data & Society and The Politics of AI: Governance, Resistance, Alternatives with Sustainable AI Futures (Goldsmith University)
CULTUS with Zach Blas (2023) — commissioned by Arebyte Gallery, London, UK, and Secession, Vienna, Austria
Profundior with Zach Blas (2023) — commissioned by Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, exhibited at Hamburger Bahnhof
576 Tears with Zach Blas (2022) — commissioned by UP Projects for “This is Public Space” series
The Doors with Zach Blas (2020) — commissioned by Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg, de Young Museum, San Fransisco, and Van Abbemuseum, Eidhoven
ml research interests video language models — few shot learning — generative models — Bayesian modeling — computer vision: video understanding, video generation, object and movement detection
other interests contemporary dance — internal family systems — humanistic councelling
publications
D’Cruz, A.∗, Tegho, C.∗, Greaves, S.∗, & Kermode L. (2022). Detecting Tear Gas Canisters With Limited Training Data. IEEE/CVF
Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV). ∗equal contribution
Tegho, C., Budzianowski, P., & Gašić, M. (2018). Benchmarking Uncertainty Estimates With Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue
Policy Optimisation. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).
Tegho, C., Budzianowski, P., & Gašić, M. (2017). Uncertainty Estimates for Efficient Neural Network-based Dialogue Policy Optimisation. Accepted at the Bayesian Deep Learning Workshop, 31st Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
machine learning work
2022 - 2024 Unitary, London, UK — Develop and deploy multimodal machine learning models and pipelines for detecting harmful content in videos, images and text
2017 - 2022 Calipsa, London, UK — Design, implement and evaluate models and software prototypes for object detection and motion detection in videos
Chris Tegho —
Spreepark Art Residency / Disruptive Nostalgia
Spreepark Art Space Link: https://www.spreepark-artspace.de/en/residencies/international/residency-groups/disruptive-nostalgia/
Our memories reclaim places changed by interruptions.
Play reclaim our memories.
Play as our tool for care, resistance, understanding and reclaiming against violence.
—
When we first approached the park, my connection to the park was one related to interruptions and reclamations. The park being abandoned, then reclaimed by nature, but also by people and people’s memories, was how I connected to a memory of a place in Beirut, where I played for hours when I was a child. This place sits strongly in my memory because of its significance in relation to a war, whose story and remnants remain as mysterious as they’ve always been. While Spreepark’s story, and history, is less mysterious than Lebanon's war is to my generation in Lebanon, both places are places of abandonment, reclaimed by memories, nature, destruction and reconstruction.
We approached Spreepark through the lens of material and colour, because, for me, memories are often attached to specific textures and to colours that carry the emotional weight of a moment. Colour became our entry point into the park and into our own memories of play. What colours do we remember from our childhoods? What do they tell us about the story of a place, and of how we played there? What is play, and how do we engage in it, then and now?
These questions guided our research throughout the residency. Each of us mapped our memories through colour, producing palettes that became a kind of glossary and a visual record of childhood geographies and personal histories. These recollections were deeply contextual. In Lesego’s memory, she played in red soil, its surface ritually raked each morning to reveal any traces of a snake. The ritual was a way of making fear visible. Play, in this context, became a response to fear, and a form of resistance against it.
In my memory, play gave new life to a place that had been forgotten, damaged, and burdened with violence. Play gave us access to the off-limits and let us imagine joy where only remnants remained.
Francis Alÿs’s La Roue speaks to this same idea. In the video, a boy uses a heavy tire to push uphill a mine’s refuse mound then to descend in a rush of joy. The site of extraction becomes a playground. “The hill on which the boy plays is in reality a pile of waste from a mine, thus constituting tangible evidence of the plunder of natural resources and child labor. The playing child transforms precisely this place of exploitation and injustice into a vast space for play. In this video, nature is no longer an ‘outside’ to be dominated and controlled but a participant in the game.”
Similarly, we found that Spreepark, in its state of abandonment, invited these alternative uses. The abandoned structures and overgrown pathways did not resist play but made it possible.
All of us shared memories of places not built for play. What does it mean, then, to play in a space that was built for amusement? What happens when a space designed for thrill and spectacle becomes quiet, overgrown, and open to reinterpretation?
We examined Spreepark’s history, its materiality, its interruptions, and its changing colours. When it operated as an amusement park, especially after Norbert Witte took ownership in 1991, play was tightly controlled and shaped by rides, fixed schedules, and spectacle. The colour palette of the park during this time reflected its purpose. But when the park was abandoned in 2001, these orchestrated experiences gave way to nature. People crossed into the space without permission, What remained were fragments and with them, an unplanned and unsupervised play began.
—
From our time in Spreepark, we came to see play as something that does not require permission. It reclaims, reimagines and works with what is at hand (colour, soil, waste, or ruin), and turns it into something else. Colour, in particular, holds memory and carries the emotional charge of places.
Our play had no architecture to lean on and the materials were participants. If play in the amusement park was about deliverable excitement, play in these unacknowledged places was about locating care, possibility, or defiance in what had been overlooked. And when Spreepark was abandoned, it came closer to this second kind of play. The space began listening. It became porous, letting people and nature in without instruction. In this openness, play returned as a quiet form of resistance to fixed use and to forgetting and Spreepark became a map of interruptions, and celebrations of how we resist, how we play and how we reclaim.
