Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams

Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams is Refik Anadol Studio’s second large-scale solo exhibition in Germany, opened at König Galerie in October 2021. Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams, designed specifically for König Galerie, comprises four novel aesthetic approaches to a vast photographic dataset of nature: A giant LED screen displaying machine-generated, dynamic pigments of nature, a site-specific, real-time public art projection on the facade of the gallery’s unique building, four new series of data sculptures, and 3 square-box data paintings featuring landscape- and flower-themed GAN walks. An architectural exhibition of synesthetic reality experiments based on GAN algorithms developed by artificial intelligence and inspired by fluid dynamics, Nature Dreams turns these datasets into latent multi-sensory experiences to commemorate the beauty of the earth we share.

Machine Hallucinations is the Studio’s ongoing exploration of data aesthetics based on collective visual memories of space, nature, and urban environments. Since the inception of the project during his 2016 during Google AMI Residency, Anadol has been utilizing machine intelligence as a collaborator to human consciousness, specifically DCGAN, PGAN and StyleGAN algorithms trained on these vast datasets to reveal unrecognized layers of our external realities. Anadol and his team collect data from digital archives and publicly available resources, then process the millions of photographic memories with machine learning classification models. The sorted image datasets are then clustered into thematic categories to better understand the semantic context of the data universe.