November 19, 2022
A Machine Dreams in MoMA's Lobby
Refik Anadol's 'Unsupervised', a hypnotic AI artwork trained on MoMA's collection, turned the museum's lobby into a swirling, ever-changing dreamscape in 2022.
In late 2022, visitors to New York's Museum of Modern Art were met by a towering screen of churning, glowing colour. Refik Anadol's 'Unsupervised' fed MoMA's entire collection into an artificial-intelligence model and let it 'dream' — endlessly reinterpreting modern art in real time.
The Turkish-American artist's work treated data as pigment and algorithms as a brush, conjuring fluid, hallucinatory imagery that never repeated itself.
For some it was the future of art; for others, a beautiful screensaver. Either way, MoMA's embrace of machine-made imagery signalled that AI had arrived at the heart of the establishment.
Image: “The staff of the Museum of Modern Art in 1937 in front of the museum on West 53rd Street” — Creator:Soichi Sunami, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.