Refik Anadol unveils ‘first-of-its-kind’ AI artwork NFTs
Alum and Visiting Assistant Researcher Refik Anadol (Design Media Arts, MFA '14), works in the fields of site-specific public art and live audio/visual performance with an immersive installation approach, particularly his works explore the space among digital and physical entities by creating a hybrid relationship between architecture and media arts.
Image copyright: Refik Anadol Studio for Sotheby’s Refik Anadol Studio has announced details of their Machine Hallucinations - Space: Metaverse NFT Collection, which is set to be auctioned by Sotheby’s Hong Kong. To create the NFTs, Anadol has minted a machine’s memories and dreams of space onto the blockchain, manifested through eight unique artworks. The works are set to become the first-ever examples of immersive digital experiences being converted into NFTs.
The eight works consist of an immersive physical experience, three infinitely generative data paintings, three unique AI data paintings, and a one-of-a-kind robotically-produced AI data sculpture. Following their online auction from Sotheby’s Hong Kong from September 30th to October 4th, the works will be exhibited at the Digital Art Fair in Hong Kong from October 1st to 17th, 2021.
“Since 2015, I have been speculating the relationship between the human mind, architecture, aesthetics, and new media forms to answer the question: If a machine can learn, can it hallucinate?” said Refik Anadol, unveiling the NFT artworks. “After my residency at Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence Program in 2016, I began pushing the boundaries of that question and creating my body of work by embedding media arts into architecture with countless canvases on which to display my art. My inspiration has always come from colliding the physical and virtual worlds, and with the advent of NFTs, I can now also imagine the metaverse as my canvas.”
The NFTs build on Anadol’s ongoing Machine Hallucinations series, which he began in 2016. In March 2021, Machine Memoirs: Space opened at the Pilevneli Gallery in Anadol’s native Istanbul and has since become the most visited art exhibition in Turkey’s history. To produce the NFTs, Anadol’s team used over 2 million raw images captured and recorded by the International Space Station, the MRO, and the Hubble telescope, creating a vast dataset to train the AI network. — Niall Patrick Walsh, Sept. 17, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Archinect website.
HEADER IMAGE: Image copyright: Refik Anadol Studio for Sotheby’s
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