Refik Anadol Studio’s ongoing project Machine Hallucinations explores data aesthetics based on collective visual memories.
Since the inception of the project in 2016, Anadol has utilized machine intelligence as a collaborator of human consciousness, specifically DCGAN, PGAN, and StyleGAN algorithms trained on vast datasets to unfold unrecognized layers of our external realities. Anadol and his team collect data from digital archives and publicly available resources, and process these datasets with machine-learning classification models. As a masterfully curated multi-channel experience, Machine Hallucinations brings a self-regenerating element of surprise to the audience and offers a new form of sensorial autonomy via cybernetic serendipity.
The AI-based abstract images and shapes that result from the machine’s unsupervised learning of modern art are dictated by the Museum’s collection archive, weighted toward the special exhibition of new artworks at MoMA this fall. The AI data pigmentation, in turn, captures the movement in the latent space created by autonomous machine hallucinations. Each data connection is driven by an edge-detection algorithm and colorized by the density of its previous and next latent coordinates. In other words, the machine allows the artist to trace its “unconscious decisions,” in a network of intricate and poetic connections.
MACHINE HALLUCINATIONS — NATURE DREAMS, designed specifically for KÖNIG GALERIE, comprises three novel aesthetic approaches to a vast photographic dataset of nature: A giant data sculpture displaying machine-generated, dynamic pigments of nature titled NATURE DREAMS, four new series of data paintings, and WINDS OF BERLIN, a site-specific, public art projection on the tower of ST. AGNES which will be created based on environmental real-time data collected from the city.
Anadol is also a pioneer in the world of rare digital art and crypto collectibles, minting the first fully immersive digital artwork NFT in September 2021. For KÖNIG GALERIE he creates unique NFT options: the AI data sculpture NATURE DREAMS, and his public projection, WINDS OF BERLIN, which will mark the first time a generative public artwork in Berlin to be offered in NFT form.
An architectural exhibition of synesthetic reality experiments based on GAN algorithms developed by artificial intelligence and inspired by fluid dynamics, NATURE DREAMS turns datasets into latent multi-sensory experiences to commemorate the beauty of the earth we share.
