Inside Refik Anadol’s Dream Machine
The Turkish digital artist trains his bespoke artificial intelligence models to dream. After educating them on datasets containing hundreds of thousands of images from our collective memory— scenes of nature, urban spaces, scans of human bodies—he “paints,” coaxing his machines to produce mind-melting visual fantasies that appear briefly on a screen before fading away, never to be repeated. After exhibiting at MoMA and designing the stage for the 2023 Grammy Awards, today the artist opens his first major Los Angeles exhibition "Living Paintings" at Jeffrey Deitch.
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?
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Cultured website.
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