Unsupervised

If you walked towards the back of the lobby at MoMA in recent months, past the turnstiles you would find the space busy with people standing and sitting around while staring at a seething, squirming double-height wall, supported by accompanying sound. What they were experiencing was a beguiling site-specific work of AI-assisted abstraction, Unsupervised, a “machine dream” was constantly drawing data from images within the vast collection of the museum and mixing this with other data inputs from the location (such as light, movement, acoustics, the weather outside, etc.). All this was processed in real-time to create a continuously changing artwork. In a way, the ‘machine’ behind Unsupervised was meditating on the potential past and present of all the art. But as we know, AI machines still don’t quite have autonomy in their thoughts. It is notable that Anadol’s installations, whether at MoMA or at various other locations, tend to look somewhat similar. There is a distinct aesthetic to the output, whatever the endlessly changing source may be. As with visual AI platforms such as DALL·E or Midjourney, the machines have their own visual bias, or style, call it what you will. For that, we must credit Anadol and his studio as the knowledge and tools he employs are ultimately in his creative grasp, even if they are a unique blend of algorithms and other newfangledness rather than oil paints or video, and so on, as in art past. The vision is always his, really, even if the machine dreams it. The work is entrancing, to judge by the time people sit watching it when they have paid to be upstairs with all the billions of dollars of old art to see. Anadol and his assistants, physical or digital, are onto something new but can they reinvent themselves again? It will be worth tracking.

The constantly metamorphosing imagery of Unsupervised draws from MoMA’s collection and the live data around it.

The MoMa installation of Unsupervised closed on 15 April 2023. Examples of the generative imagery from the installation can be seen on the video below (embed of the link below) and more at Refik Anadol’s website.