What would a machine dream of after seeing the collection of The Museum of Modern Art? For Unsupervised, artist Refik Anadol
(b. 1985) uses artificial intelligence to interpret and transform more than two hundred years of art at MoM. Known for his groundbreaking media works and public installations, Anadol has created a singular meditation on technology, creativity, and modern art.
Unsupervised features a digital artwork that unfolds in real time, continuously generating new and otherworldly forms that envelop viewers in a large-scale installation. The artist trained a sophisticated machine learning model to interpret the publicly available data of MoM’s collection. As the machine learning model “walks” through its conception of this vast range of works, it reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been-and what might be to come. In turn, Anadol incorporates site-specific input from the surrounding environment of the Museum’s Gund Lobby-changes in light, movement, acoustics, and the weather–to affect the continuously shifting imagery and sound. The history of modern art is transformed by the liveness of public space in the present.
Anadol’s installation reshapes the relationship between the physical and the virtual, the real and the unreal. Often, Al is used to classify, process, and generate realistic representations of the world. Unsupervised, by contrast, is visionary: it explores fantasy. hallucination, and irrationality, creating an alternate understanding of artmaking itself. The installation is based on works that are encoded on the blockchain, a distributed digital ledger, which stands as a public record of Anadol’s art. By revivifying and remodeling archives of collective memory, Anadol hopes to pose new futures.
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