EZPELETA
Refik Anadol
Mechanical Dreams
In a world where dreams metamorphose into reality, and ideas breathe life into new narratives, history finds itself perpetually rewritten.
Through time, human endeavor has been characterized by unceasing exploration, information acquisition, and the pursuit of unexplored possibilities, continually transforming the world we inhabit.
Today, the omnipresence of machines in our daily lives, constantly recording our actions and gathering a wealth of information about both our world and ourselves, invites an intriguing question: Could these machines, in their endless data accumulation, do more than just process data? Can they transcend their programmed functions to imagine, to dream?
In this exclusive exhibition you can delve in mechanical dreams. The artworks exhibited are some of the most iconic pieces in the career of Refik Anadol a turkish artist, data scientist and researcher based in LA exploring the possibilities of machines to actually create pushing the boundaries of technological innovation.
"For me, data is not just a bunch of numbers. For me, data is actually a memory."
The artist speculates on the possibility that machines that collect so many images, sounds and data in their memories, could dream about the universe.
“What could machines do with the memory of someone else?.”
REFIK ANADOL
Refik Anadol, an artist of universal appeal and transcultural resonance. He aims to make art for all ages and cultures and has harnessed the possibilities of blockchain to revolutionize public art. He stands as a pioneering figure, being the first artist to seamlessly integrate AI into his public installations. His works have been exhibited over 20 cities across seven countries, spanning four continents, with select pieces fetching prices exceeding millions of dollars. Notably, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has recognized the significance of his art by acquiring one of his pieces for its permanent collection. Most recently, he unveiled the grandest AI projection in the majestic Sphere Hall of Las Vegas.
Anadol's groundbreaking research revolves around the meticulous curation of colossal data sets, interpreted through cutting-edge machine intelligence programs (NVIDIA softwares). Collaborating with various data repositories, Anadol and his team have employed custom algorithms to train machine intelligence systems in deciphering these datasets, aiming to reflect some collective memory as humans and creating commemorative representations of it. As you journey through this exhibition, you will encounter artworks born from an amalgamation of diverse data sources, including photographic space archives, astronomic imagery, million nature images, and records from the world's first all-civilian spaceflight.
THE ARTWORKS
The collection “Machine Hallucinations - space: metaverse” includes different artworks born from the artist collaboration with NASA JPL (which began in 2018) and his research into the photographic history of space exploration which is part of an-going AI research of data aesthetics. Studying the visuals of the most comprehensive telescopes, the artist started to speculate on the possibility that telescopes, with so many images in their memory, could dream about the universe.
Machine Hallucinations : Mars
This piece is a real-time generative artwork, it never repeats itself and is constantly dreaming about Mars’s surface.
It has been made with a custom AI model trained by half million satellite images of Mars and processed real-time by the Studio’s signature fluid dynamics algorithm.
The artist’s exploration of AI data pigmentation and light through fluid solver algorithms accelerated by GPU computation* and real-time ray-traced lighting*, manifests this inspiration by showcasing the most innovative methods available to AI-based media artists.
Such machine-generated hallucinations allude to a connection with the vast cosmos and include visuals that trigger a sense of belonging to the Earth and to our immediate environments.
This is an original and unique piece acquired at Sotheby’s for half a million dollars.
Machine Hallucinations – Earth
This is an AI data painting inspired by the famous astrophysicist Carl Sagan.
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were.
But without it, we go nowhere.”
It is made from photographic astronomic data with AI technology and new media art, imagining a visualized data universe as a first step to reach the Earth’s unseen dimensions. This universe exhibits multiple flow of networks between data points made up of Earth’s and other celestial objects’ topologies, giving us a glimpse into the latent landscapes of our planet hallucinated by the mind of a machine.
This is an original and unique piece acquired at Sotheby’s for 300.000 dollars.
Machine Hallucinations : Galaxy
This is a real-time generative AI data painting that uses GAN algorithm model* to transform visual archives recorded by the Hubble telescope into generative data pigments that are constantly changing, just like the visual archive of space is constantly growing.
Hubble is one of NASA’s most successful and long-lasting science missions. It has beamed hundreds of thousands of images back to Earth, shedding light on many of the great mysteries of astronomy. Among its many discoveries, Hubble has revealed the age of the universe to be about 13.8 billion years. Hubble played a key role in the discovery of dark energy, a force that causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
This is an original and unique piece acquired at Sotheby’s for half a million dollars.
Artificial Landscapes - CA
This artwork is based on a dataset of approximately 155 million of nature images collected by the artist studio, that transforms publicly available data and images into vibrant, abstract digital works. The artist used StyleGAN2-ADA* to capture the landscapes and colors in a multi-dimensional space, Anadol and his team trained a unique AI model with subsets of the collected image archive. After the training, the AI generates abstracted landscapes, constructing new aesthetic visuals and color combinations based on the dataset and through unique lines drawn by algorithmic connections.
This piece was Refik Anadol’s first major solo exhibition in LA, providing a contemplative and transparent framework of the artist’s main inspirations for turning dystopian science fictions into near-future utopian narratives, technical aspirations, and unique view of multi-sensory aesthetic experiences.
Data Universe - Inspiration4 - Voice & Data Universe - Inspiration4 - image
The collection “An important memory for humanity” utilises data from the world’s first all-civilian space flight and presents data visualisation of all aspects of the spacex inspiration4 mission and data from the NASA -funded research institute TRISH. The intention is to create awareness of the challenges from the adverse effects of space upon the human body.
These works walk us in the data universe of all the images (A) and spoken words (B) from the mission as the space travelers were looking at earth from space, creating a visual representation of looking at humanity from outer space.