its easy to get lost in Murphy Canadas surreal installations but dig a little deeper and you realize his work is made up of millions of tiny pieces and that every single little point represents a piece of data that hes fed through a neural network to show us his vision of our future I was always like trying to like speculate this idea of can data become a pigment at the end the data is a truly numbers that has no kind of in a.
skin or skeleton but what Im frankly as an artist is find an algorithm that can narrate the moment of data kind of like make that invisible moment visible enormous datasets inspire most of a Nadals art and he uses machine intelligence and algorithms to create visualizations what he calls data sculptures like this piece called machine hallucinations he started by finding a hundred and thirteen million images of New York online and let the Machine learn from the entire corpus of data and then we.
also find a way to erase the humans from this data and only focus on the buildings nature and environments that is a collective memory of New York once all of the images of people were removed Anna Dahl was left with ten million pictures of New York he fed them through a machine learning algorithm that generates visual associations as it learns for example when it sees multiple photos of the Statue of Liberty taken from slightly different angles the.
algorithm interpolates information to help it create a moving shifting image that represents the entire lifecycle of the structure mission looks at this information like a human being but its kind of more like a collective memories than a personal memories because a building in New York can be explored by thousands of perspectives from multiple angles from a different time of the year its more like an honest memory for a machine because it feels more totalitarian and like it feels everything and everyone than just one person and it all covered the walls in.
the floor of a boiler room in a building in lower Manhattan with this machine interpreted dynamic landscape if you ask him hell tell you that the machine is dreaming when a machine learns from outputs and memories like this it can create an alternative reality it look at the patterns of the trees the buildings and nature the people every single thing hidden inside this image corpus seeing a machine giving a context of data and creating and hallucinating outputs or.
something like really inspiring in it all created this piece to celebrate the centennial of the LA Philharmonic using half a million images thousands of audio recordings and hundreds of videos from the orchestras archives he fed all that into a series of algorithms that turned it into these extraordinary projected images by using measuring algorithms the entire archive of LA Philharmonic becomes a shape of three-dimensional outputs we were able to see all these data points be coming together or disappearing and making kind of a new sculptures and the building itself Frank Gehrys Walt Disney Concert Hall became.
part of the sculpture too I was always like looking for inspiring buildings and Frank Gehry became my hero and I rent a car went to downtown it was 2:00 a m the buildings light was off like there was nothing around him and that night I was really struck by an idea like what will happen if this building can remember like in a dream so he projected the machine interpreted archives onto a smaller model of the Walt Disney Concert Hall once he settled on something he liked he projected it onto the bigger.
real-life building what we are doing is another typical painting and a typical sculpture but more like an experience from a near future and when they come together with sound data machine intelligence and light and architecture they have a new meaning and in kind of symbiotic content connections I think I was really hooked up by the idea of a building can become an interface it can.
be a boring advertising but it can be a beautiful interface the ideation of a human instinct become a part of a machine is really striking me like emotionally Anna dhaan his team used 42 large scale projectors with an astonishing 50k video resolution to create a dramatic display in downtown LA every night for 10 days and not one of his favorite movies I was 8 years old when I watched the movie Blade Runner I was extremely inspired by the movie in.
downtown Los Angeles a building suddenly becomes alive and it has this cognitive capacity of remembering and it has a capacity of dreaming so this was all like very high level science fiction narratives and the futuristic dystopian films exploration of more complex themes echo a Nadals interest in the relationship between humans and technology Ron Deckard and Rachael like contemplates each other and has a dialogue where Deckard defines Rachael as a replicant it was a very interesting.
moment or a human defines another machine that is kind of this defining what is real or what is not that that kind of human consciousness and machine consciousness were having its dialog moment that was truly inspiring you remember the spider that lived in a bush outside your window the egg hatched those arent your memories there’s somebody elses I think in humanity we have very certain findings that transform who we are when we found the.
fire we cook with it we create communities with the same technology we kill each other and destroy and clearly AI is one of the discovery in humanity that has a potential to make communities or destroy each other Anna defines data for his machine intelligence collaborations everywhere and when he learned that when data is continuously being collected at the Boston Airport he knew hed found a gold.
mine he turned it all into this project called winds of Boston I was always inspired by nature as an inspiration from the like the wind itself the water do the nature like a core nature like aspect of motion theory in life in general and I know this can be an incredible opportunity like use wind as it like a data and as a pigment.
so we first located our data source from the airport Logan Airport the wind is extremely important for the flight networks so we took a one-year long wind data of Boston and this data consists of the gust of speed and direction and the temperature of the weather and it all fed all this wind data into a series of algorithms then he built custom 13 foot tall LED screens to.
display the visualized data and I thought that algorithms can be an incredible way of visualizing this invisible pattern of wind and transform them into a poetic like motion because its very inspiring that the machine can find something interesting that I didnt even think about it and and I found that the true collaboration starts happen there and sometimes machine gives opportunities that I didnt think about it and I do believe that is really something that is inspiring for Humanity.
that will most likely bring some new kind of imagination methods that is not discovered yet the inspiration for this project called melting memories came from a personal place I went to Istanbul my hometown and my uncle just couldnt remember where I am coming from and apparently it was his first stage of Alzheimer when this disease happens we literally melt our memories our brain tissue disappears but I also like was very curious about scientifically honestly what memory means like where.
they come from what is the cognitive like representation of a memory and the images on these 20-foot tall LED screens represent the real data behind that process and these moments are really trying to give a sense of a tangible feeling of a memory I know that we are not there as technology that truly transcripts in memory but it at least gives a glimpse of an abstract language of a memory that’s one of those feelings that is hidden in those algorithmic exploration of data ended up partnered with scientist at a neuroscience lab they asked subjects to concentrate on.
childhood memories and recorded all their brain pulses using an EEG the data itself is literally pulsing in a 4 milliseconds of a human brain activity in the – location of brain from hippocampus the frontal left lobe and the algorithm symbolizes the moment of remembering and it is how poetic moment of this firing location into location of the brain in a doll and his team created custom software that transformed all of that brain data into an artistic interpretation of the neurons firing another example of how we use this technology to describe life I never.
stopped thinking about data as a as a as a mean of like material sometimes it can be a wind data it can be a Wi-Fi Bluetooth signal it can be a mission intelligent decisions it can be a CPU data GPU data its honestly anything that machine needs to understand life can become a material for this imagination one problem we had to solve today is a visual discontinuity problem.
ennahdha has built a team with expertise in different fields to help him fulfill his vision AI experts computer scientist architects and designers and theyre working out a new workflow for a data-driven public art project set for Portland for this one a Nadals letting hundreds of thousands of images of Portland and form both the projections and the structure theyll be projected on the team is using a 3d printer to build a structure one panel at a time it will ultimately be a 21 foot tall sculpture I found that we were stuck in.
this just virtual world I found that we are in the screens to the flat world of like imagination I was really looking forward how we can take this mission consciousness out of the screen and bring it in 3d 3d world whatever is in store for the future of an adults work machine learning will be the foundation its very clear that machines can really capture our data machines can capture our decisions our memories but its not.
clear what will happen to them and I think also clearly the data we leave behind is the memories of humanity my obsession with this relationship is what else we can do with that.
Artist Refik Anadol doesn’t work with paintbrushes or clay. Instead, he uses large collections of data and machine learning algorithms to create mesmerizing and dynamic installations.
Machine Hallucination at Artechouse NYC: https://www.artechouse.com/nyc
WDCH Dreams: https://www.laphil.com/visit/when-youre-here/wdchdreams
Winds of Boston: http://refikanadol.com/works/wind-of-boston-data-paintings/
Melting Memories: http://refikanadol.com/works/melting-memories/
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How This Guy Uses A.I. to Create Art | Obsessed | WIRED