Hallucinates by MoMA’s digital wall exhibition Design
Art becomes data becomes art Unsupervisedan exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Artist Anadol Rafik trained a neural network on 200 years of art from MoMA’s holdings, sprinkling that with some randomness (weather, ambient light and sound in space, for example) to create a changing giant concept that suggests art has trained art to “dream.” This is an AI model that is actually supposed to cheat. This is not the simple language of bar charts or timelines. Rather, it offers only a sense of the MoMA collection moving through different art movements and styles over time. As a teenager, Rafik was inspired by the film Blade RunnerA depiction of an imagined Los Angeles of the future. He claims that architecture is his canvas and data is his pigment.
Don’t leave by Buzzard Soup by Buzzard Soup in the explanation in the same art installation? I would almost turn around and walk away, but then I would miss the opportunity to consider how my own subconscious spoke to me in images and metaphors instead of just saying what was on my mind. The show ended in October 2023, but a video is available on the MMA website (https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5535)
This article originally appeared in Issue 4 Nightingale Magazine