Art in the age of machine intelligence Refik Anadol
Hi, I’m Refik. I’m a media artist.
I use data as a pigment
and paint with a thinking brush
that is assisted
by artificial intelligence.
Using architectural spaces as canvases,
I collaborate with machines
to make buildings dream and hallucinate.
You may be wondering,
what does all this mean?
So let me please take you
into my work and my world.
I witnessed the power of imagination
when I was eight years old,
as a child growing up in Istanbul.
One day, my mom brought home
a videocassette
of the science-fiction movie
“Blade Runner.”
I clearly remember being mesmerized
by the stunning architectural vision
of the future of Los Angeles,
a place that I had never seen before.
That vision became
a kind of a staple of my daydreams.
When I arrived in LA in 2012
for a graduate program
in Design Media Arts,
I rented a car and drove downtown
to see that wonderful world
of the near future.
I remember a specific line
that kept playing
over and over in my head:
the scene when the android Rachael
realizes that her memories
are actually not hers,
and when Deckard tells her
they are someone else’s memories.
Since that moment,
one of my inspirations
has been this question.
What can a machine do
with someone else’s memories?
Or, to say that in another way,
what does it mean to be an AI
in the 21st century?
Any android or AI machine
is only intelligent
as long as we collaborate with it.
It can construct things
that human intelligence intends to produce
but does not have the capacity to do so.
Think about your activities
and social networks, for example.
They get smarter
the more you interact with them.
If machines can learn or process memories,
can they also dream?
Hallucinate?
Involuntarily remember,
or make connections
between multiple people’s dreams?
Does being an AI in the 21st century
simply mean not forgetting anything?
And, if so,
isn’t it the most revolutionary thing
that we have experienced
in our centuries-long effort
to capture history across media?
In other words,
how far have we come
since Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner”?
So I established my studio in 2014
and invited architects,
computer and data scientists,
neuroscientists,
musicians and even storytellers
to join me in realizing my dreams.
Can data become a pigment?
This was the very first question we asked
when starting our journey
to embed media arts into architecture,
to collide virtual and physical worlds.
So we began to imagine
what I would call the poetics of data.
One of our first projects,
“Virtual Depictions,”
was a public data sculpture piece
commissioned by the city of San Francisco.
The work invites the audience
to be part of a spectacular
aesthetic experience
in a living urban space
by depicting a fluid network
of connections of the city itself.
It also stands as a reminder
of how invisible data
from our everyday lives,
like the Twitter feeds
that are represented here,
can be made visible
and transformed into sensory knowledge
that can be experienced collectively.
In fact, data can only become knowledge
when it’s experienced,
and what is knowledge and experience
can take many forms.
When exploring such connections
through the vast potential
of machine intelligence,
we also pondered the connection
between human senses
and the machines' capacity
for simulating nature.
These inquiries began
while working on wind-data paintings.
They took the shape of visualized poems
based on hidden data sets
that we collected from wind sensors.
We then used generative algorithms
to transform wind speed,
gust and direction
into an ethereal data pigment.
The result was a meditative
yet speculative experience.
This kinetic data sculpture,
titled “Bosphorus,”
was a similar attempt to question
our capacity to reimagine
natural occurrences.
Using high-frequency radar collections
of the Marmara Sea,
we collected sea-surface data
and projected its dynamic movement
with machine intelligence.
We create a sense of immersion
in a calm yet constantly changing
synthetic sea view.
Seeing with the brain
is often called imagination,
and, for me, imagining architecture
goes beyond just glass, metal or concrete,
instead experimenting with
the furthermost possibilities of immersion
and ways of augmenting
our perception in built environments.
Research in artificial intelligence
is growing every day,
leaving us with the feeling
of being plugged into a system
that is bigger and more knowledgeable
than ourselves.
In 2017, we discovered
an open-source library
of cultural documents in Istanbul
and began working on “Archive Dreaming,”
one of the first AI-driven
public installations in the world,
an AI exploring approximately
1.7 million documents that span 270 years.
One of our inspirations
during this process
was a short story
called “The Library of Babel”
by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
In the story, the author conceives
a universe in the form of a vast library
containing all possible 410-page books
of a certain format and character set.
Through this inspiring image,
we imagine a way to physically explore
the vast archives of knowledge
in the age of machine intelligence.
The resulting work, as you can see,
was a user-driven immersive space.
“Archive Dreaming” profoundly transformed
the experience of a library
in the age of machine intelligence.
“Machine Hallucination”
is an exploration of time and space
experienced through New York City’s
public photographic archives.
For this one-of-a-kind immersive project,
we deployed machine-learning algorithms
to find and process over
100 million photographs of the city.
We designed an innovative narrative system
to use artificial intelligence
to predict or to hallucinate new images,
allowing the viewer
to step into a dreamlike fusion
of past and future New York.
As our projects delve deeper
into remembering
and transmitting knowledge,
we thought more about how memories
were not static recollections
but ever-changing
interpretations of past events.
We pondered how machines
could simulate unconscious
and subconscious events,
such as dreaming,
remembering and hallucinating.
Thus, we created “Melting Memories”
to visualize the moment of remembering.
The inspiration came from a tragic event,
when I found out that my uncle
was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
At that time, all I could think about
was to find a way to celebrate
how and what we remember
when we are still able to do so.
I began to think of memories
not as disappearing
but as melting or changing shape.
With the help of machine intelligence,
we worked with the scientists
at the Neuroscape Laboratory
at the University of California,
who showed us how to understand
brain signals as memories are made.
Although my own uncle was losing
the ability to process memories,
the artwork generated by EEG data
explored the materiality of remembering
and stood as a tribute
to what my uncle had lost.
Almost nothing about contemporary LA
matched my childhood
expectation of the city,
with the exception
of one amazing building:
the Walt Disney Concert Hall,
designed by Frank Gehry,
one of my all-time heroes.
In 2018, I had a call
from the LA Philharmonic
who was looking for an installation
to help mark the celebrated symphony’s
hundred-year anniversary.
For this, we decided to ask the question,
“Can a building learn? Can it dream?”
To answer this question,
we decided to collect everything recorded
in the archives of the LA Phil and WDCH.
To be precise, 77 terabytes
of digitally archived memories.
By using machine intelligence,
the entire archive, going back 100 years,
became projections on the building’s skin,
42 projectors to achieve
this futuristic public experience
in the heart of Los Angeles,
getting one step closer
to the LA of “Blade Runner.”
If ever a building could dream,
it was in this moment.
Now, I am inviting you to one last journey
into the mind of a machine.
Right now, we are fully immersed
in the data universe
of every single curated TED Talk
from the past 30 years.
That means this data set includes
7,705 talks from the TED stage.
Those talks have been translated
into 7.4 million seconds,
and each second is represented
here in this data universe.
Every image that you are seeing in here
represents unique moments
from those talks.
By using machine intelligence,
we processed a total of 487,000 sentences
into 330 unique clusters of topics
like nature, global emissions,
extinction, race issues, computation,
trust, emotions, water and refugees.
These clusters are then
connected to each other
by an algorithm,
[that] generated 113 million
line segments,
which reveal new conceptual relationships.
Wouldn’t it be amazing
to be able to remember
all the questions that have ever
been asked on the stage?
Here I am,
inside the mind
of countless great thinkers,
as well as a machine,
interacting with various feelings
attributed to learning,
remembering, questioning
and imagining all at the same time,
expanding the power of the mind.
For me, being right here
is indeed what it means
to be an AI in the 21st century.
It is in our hands, humans,
to train this mind to learn and remember
what we can only dream of.
Thank you.