Machine Hallucinations — Sphere

Machine Hallucinations: Sphere presents a series of AI Data Sculptures that incorporates vivid pigments, shapes, and patterns, creating a collective, meditative, and multi-sensory experience. This immersive artwork simulates the rhythms of various environments and invites visitors to imagine alternative realities constructed by invisible data movements around them.
Machine Hallucinations is an 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, Refik Anadol has been utilizing machine intelligence as a collaborator to human consciousness, specifically DCGAN, PGAN, StyleGAN and Generative AI algorithms trained on these vast datasets to reveal unrecognized layers of our external realities.
Machine Hallucinations: Sphere features dynamic visualizations of data that are based on vast archives containing visual imageries of space and nature while celebrating the unique architecture of Sphere Las Vegas. For this project, Anadol and his team used nature-themed datasets as the building blocks for distinct chapters of the artwork and trained a unique AI model with subsets of the collected image archives. After the training, when idle and unsupervised, the “machine mind” generates new aesthetic visuals and color combinations through unique lines drawn by algorithmic connections. The fluidity of the visual patterns not only performs a digital synthesis of data, but also represents the many interlocking layers of nature, humanity, and technology in our age of global mobility and machine intelligence.