In the lobby of MoMA for the past few months, a huge LED SCREEN HAS BEAMED an abstract CGI animation that morphs from blossoming clouds to splashing fountains of paint to lurid fungal blooms to pale, Surrealist pencil-like drawings. The audience sits and watches or mills around it. A little girl films the screen, holding up her phone and following its movements, swaying from side to side as though entranced. This is “Unsupervised,” 2022, an exhibition by Turkish artist Refik Anadol that makes a serious attempt to answer the question, What would a machine dream about after seeing the collection of the Museum of Modern Art? Near the wall text that details the work’s concept, two young women explain artificial intelligence (A.I.) to a small kid in a Naruto hoodie: You don’t build an A.I., you train one. “Like a computer?” he asks. “Kind of,” they respond, “but it learns.” Here, at the entrance of one of the greatest modern art museums in the world, it feels like we’ve reached the boundary of a new and strange territory. Time and space are being manipulated and represented in radically different ways, with 200 years of art history reimagined as a series of infinite-duration simulations on a 24-square-foot display. There has been a great deal of concern over the development of A.I. in the past year, particularly surrounding text-to-image A.I. diffusion models such as DALL-E and Midjourney. The ability to appreciate—and also make—art is one of the qualities that makes us unique among living beings. If software learns to create images—perhaps even art—what does that mean for artists? For humanity? The discourse around A.I. and art is very negative, when it’s written about at all. This incredible new technology is treated as an existential threat to our livelihoods, our intellectual property, and our spirit. Anadol, however, is focused on a different side of the story: he shows how artists can collaborate with A.I. harmoniously, and how similar advanced technologies might help art to move in unexpected directions, hopefully toward progress. He arrived at MoMA at the perfect moment. Anadol was born in 1985 in Istanbul, the Turkish city that bridges Europe and Asia both geographically and culturally. “That was a really very powerful starting point in life,” he recalls, “when I think about the desire to connect the physical and virtual. It is a very similar feeling I think to connecting the West and East.” He grew up in a family of teachers in which, he says, “being a nerd is something that happens.” At eight years old he got
130 culturedmag.com
his first computer, and throughout his youth he enjoyed playing and was fascinated by strategy games, and in particular StarCraft. To make A.I. art in an ethical manner, Anadol believes it’s important that artists claim responsibility for the A.I. models they employ. Rather than off-the-shelf diffusion models, he uses bespoke GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), a different sort of A.I. entirely. A GAN learns by putting two neural networks in competition with each other in whatever specific task they’re performing. Furthermore, rather than using a dataset of other people’s personal work—as is the case with some of the popular diffusion models—Anadol’s GANs are trained on vast datasets of what he calls “collective memories.” Things that he hopes “belong to humanity, like nature, space, culture, and cities. I try to look at the whole of nature as an input.” In 2020, for his exhibition “Quantum Memories” at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, he used 200 million photos of Earth —its landscapes, oceans, and atmosphere—as a dataset. In 2019, for “Machine Hallucination: NYC,” he used 113 million images of New York City, and for Sense of Space, at 2021’s Venice Biennale of Architecture, he used approximately 70 terabytes of MRI brain scans to build an immersive installation exploring the human mind. Anadol is able to find great beauty in mathematics. It can often seem as if algorithms make today’s world smaller, but he finds ways of using them to make it feel larger, to create dazzling, immersive environments and spectacular outdoor projections. Over the years, he and his studio team of data scientists, researchers, designers, architects, and composers have trained more than 100 A.I. models on over 3 billion images. There is a famous Jorge Luis Borges story from 1946, On Rigor in Science, set in a world in which cartography develops into such a precise science that a map of the empire was the same size as the empire itself, and was laid on top of it, covering it. Eventually it fell into disrepair, although tattered fragments of the map coult still be found, as Borges writes, sheltering the occasional beast or beggar. Anadol’s art practice, likewise, could be understood as a series of Borgesian software installations made from all the world’s memories and data, writing and coding a form of optimistic science fiction that takes our universe as its subject matter. Now, for “Unsupervised,” he trained his GANs on 138,151 images of works from the MoMA collection. Having shown at institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Pinakothek der Moderne, and Walt Disney Concert Hall; participated in successful auctions with Sotheby’s and Christie’s; and joined the artist roster at Berlin’s König Galerie, Anadol has done more than almost anyone to transform data visualization into high art—for this project however, the data he visualized was art. The project was born from an online exhibition on the NFT art
“People are mostly trying to mimic reality, but in my mind, it’s much more inspiring to make A.I. have a fantasy than to recreate reality.”
