Vivid dreams

Refik Anadol’s masterly use of data sets and Al models allows him to create mesmerising living paintings’, now on display in MoMA’s Gund Lobby

- TF CHAN

Surveying and synthesising more than 200 years of art from MoMA's collection would be a daunting task for most artists and researchers. Not so much for Refik Anadol, who recently unveiled a major installation in the museum's Gund Lobby, using artificial intelligence to generate endlessly changing forms and sounds across a 24 x 24ft media wall, based on 320,000 visual inputs.

Unsupervised, as the installation is tagged, is a major career moment. "To show at MoMA is one of my biggest motivations in life,' says the Turkish-born, LA-based artist. But numerically speaking, it is far from the most ambitious. In 2019, he'd used 100 million photographs of New York City, found publicly on social networks, to create a 30-minute cinematic piece. For a 2020 exhibition at Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria, Anadol deployed Google Al's algorithms to process around 200 million nature and landscape images to create a 3D visual piece, Quantum Memories. In 2021, his contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale, Sense of Space, involved a collaboration with neuroscientist Taylor Kuhn to develop machine-learning algorithms based on 70 terabytes of MRI data, then used it to imagine the development of brain circuitry throughout the human lifespan. Not only is Anadol fascinated by what data sets tell us about the world, he also uses words like 'beautiful' and 'inspiring' to describe them.