What would a machine mind dream of after “seeing” the vast collection of The Museum of Modern Art? In other words, if the corpus of images of the MoMA collection had been accomplished by a single artist, what would their dreams look like? Emerging from Machine Hallucinations, Refik Anadol Studio’s multi-year research project that investigates data aesthetics based on collective visual memories of humanity, “Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations — MoMA” processes 138,151 images from MoMA’s collection in the mind of a machine.
For this work and the other works in this collection, Anadol processed the entire digitized archive of MoMA through StyleGAN2, an algorithm developed by NVIDIA researchers with adaptive discriminator augmentation (ADA). He then explored a latent space with a custom software called a Latent Space Browser, which Refik Anadol Studio has been developing since 2017.
“Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations — MoMA” is a realtime, software artwork that moves through the latent space of the trained GAN to continuously generate new images. Because it’s too computationally intensive to run through a web browser on non-specialized computers, it is previewed as a captured video on the Feral File site. The artwork comes with an artist-signed 3D physical certificate with backup, a custom computer with software, and a Samsung 75" QLED 4 display, to be shipped from the artist’s studio to the first collector in early 2022. This 1/1 unique video artwork will be collected through a highest-bid auction.
