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- Machine Hallucinations: Hubble Dreams-A
Anadol Refik
Digital media artist Refik Anadol works with artificial intelligence to create “machine hallucinations”, and thus addresses the question of whether machines can dream. This concept was born from a profound curiosity, taking the fact that if a machine can learn, can it also dream?
The results of the artist studio’s collaboration with NASA JPL, multiple raw images captured and recorded by the Hubble telescope, provided the artist with a vast dataset to train a generative adversarial network. By harnessing vast datasets and AI algorithms, the artist sought to visualize the dreams of machines, creating ethereal landscapes that blur the line between the digital and the physical.
Refik Anadol is a Turkish-American new media artist and designer. His projects consist of data-driven machine learning algorithms that create abstract, dream-like environments. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in photography and video and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Bilgi University in Istanbul. After his studies in Turkey, he moved to the United States to attend the Design Media Arts program at the University of California in Los Angeles where he received a second Master of Fine Arts degree. Anadol currently lives in Los Angeles, California, where Refik Anadol Studio and RAS LAB are based. RAS LAB is dedicated to researching and cultivating “new ways to data narratives and artificial intelligence
In 2021 he participated in Venice’s Architecture Biennale di Venezia with Turkish/American artist Gökhan S. Hotamışlıgil.
In 2021 Anadol created an installation for Bulgari, an Italian luxury brand, to honor the unique creativity behind the Serpenti collection. This was inspired by “the concept of metamorphosis, embodied by the Maison’s most coveted design icon”, and was claimed as the first artificial intelligence artwork done for a luxury brand.
In 2023 Anadol’s three-part digital artwork Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA (2022) was added to MoMA’s permanent collection. The work uses generative artificial intelligence to interpret MoMA’s collection and direct input from its environment.
Anadol has received several awards and recognition for this work including the Microsoft Research’s Best Vision Award, German Design Award, UCLA Art+Architecture Moss Award, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Award, SEGD Global Design Awards and Google’s Art and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency Award.