Unsupervised, AI Hallucinations @ MoMA

What if a machine studied the entire collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) accumulated over 200 years and dreamed about it to create something new and ever-changing?

“Unsupervised”, Refik Anadol’s installation at MoMA, is an interactive animation on a large scale. He trained a complex machine learning model to interpret 138,151 artworks and hallucinate on them as the artist put it, “to make the invisible visible”.  The artificial intelligence also incorporates environmental factors such as changes in light, movement, acoustics and even the weather outside to generate continuously changing abstract art in 1024 dimensions in the Gund Lobby. With live sensors in and around MoMA and real-time processing, the digital display is never the same.

Anadol, born in Istanbul in 1985, is an internationally renowned media artist, director and pioneer in the aesthetics of artificial intelligence. He focuses on discovering and developing visionary approaches to data narratives in his studio, Refik Anadol Studio and RAS LAB in Los Angeles, California. He teaches at the University of California Los Angeles’s Department of Design Media Arts, where he earned his Master of Fine Arts degree.

At MoMA, nobody – not even Anadol – knows how the hallucinating machine will interpret and change subjects, images, colors and other factors.  Witnessing the installation and its shifts in captivating compositions and contemplating the interplay of technology and abstract art leads one to ask existential questions like What is life? Where am I in the picture of life?, The haunting music deepens  the questions, the experience and the impact of the ceaseless otherworldly forms.

Unlike the widespread usage of artificial intelligence for realistic representation of tangible and tedious data, Anadol uses it to explore a dream-like state by interpreting, detecting and representing intricate connections of a collection of the finest modern art humanity has produced so far. It is fascinating to create a collective memory of visual art not only in human consciousness but also in artificial intelligence for further interpretation by a set of algorithms.

“Unsupervised” combines the limitation of defined algorithms with the vastness of refined data in a way to mirror the mind and the collective consciousness in ever-changing conditions. It opens the avenues for us to feel overwhelmed and capable at the same time.

The exhibit is available for public view at MoMA thru Mar 5, 2023.