#MACHINE HALLUCINATION NYC HOW TO#
#MACHINE HALLUCINATION NYC ARCHIVE#

Revisiting Mallarmé’s proposition in a 1977 essay, philosopher Susan Sonntag contended, “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” More recently, Jonathan Zittrain, the co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, suggested that “internet architecture” lacked a definable center and instead relied on “an extraordinary collective hallucination.” Architecting a unique sense of machine-induced collective hallucination based on documented visual experiences of NYC, Refik Anadol Studio’s Machine Hallucination adds another inquiry to such multi-layered and timeless questions about the relationship between collection and imagination.ģrd Award- Global Future Design Awards 2020 Nineteenth century poet Stéphane Mallarmé famously said that everything in the world existed to end up in a book.

#MACHINE HALLUCINATION NYC HOW TO#

As both an entertaining and enthralling experience, the machine’s hallucination can expand our capacity to dream, and help us envision things that we otherwise could not see or imagine.The question of why we collect and share our quotidian experiences has always been entangled with the formal and aesthetic concerns about how to represent reality, totality, and the depth of human imagination. Machine Hallucination offers a unique context for us to explore an alternative reality. It is a hopeful vision about the evolving relationship between machine and man, and provides an alternative to the conventional narrative of an apocalyptic future. The exhibition does not tell the story of today’s New York, but, instead, foresees what may come, through the machine intelligence’s bridging of the gap between the present and a vision of the near future. The resulting artwork is a 30-minute experimental cinema, presented in 16K resolution, that visualizes the story of New York through the city’s collective memories that constitute its deeply-hidden consciousness.

#MACHINE HALLUCINATION NYC ARCHIVE#

Machine Hallucination thus generates a novel form of synesthetic storytelling through its multilayered manipulation of a vast visual archive beyond the conventional limits of the camera and the existing cinematographic techniques. For Artechouse’s New York location, Anadol presents a data universe of New York City in 1025 latent dimensions that he creates by deploying machine learning algorithms on over 100 million photographic memories of New York City found publicly in social networks. The project focuses on latent cinematic experiences derived from representations of urban memories as they are re-imagined by machine intelligence. Refik Anadol’s most recent synesthetic reality experiments deeply engage with these centuries-old questions and attempt at revealing new connections between visual narrative, archival instinct and collective consciousness. Revisiting Mallarmé’s proposition in her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography, Susan Sonntag wrote, “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” More recently, Jonathan Zittrain, the co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and society, suggested that “internet architecture” lacked a definable center and instead relied on “an extraordinary collective hallucination.” Nineteenth century poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé famously said that everything in the world existed to end up in a book. The question of why we collect, record, and share our quotidian experiences has always been entangled with the formal and aesthetic concerns about how to represent reality, totality, and the depth of human imagination.

Machine hallucination nyc