highlike

The Collective

2°C
2°C is a unique AI generated art installation imagined through the mind of a machine. Utilising machine learning algorithms trained on thousands of archival images of geometric structures of man made cities and naturally occurring organic corals forms, the AI takes this learned data to visualise an otherwise unseen coral city. 2°C is about coral bleaching, one of the phenomenon mainly caused by rising sea temperature brought about by climate change. To prevent the massive, irreversible impacts of ocean warming on the coral reefs and their services, it is crucial to limit the global average temperature increase to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

Fuse

Treu
Treu is a real-time audiovisual installation that elaborates on the multiple meanings and implications of the concept of trust. On a macro level it observes how historical events have influenced its course and considers how this can evolve in the future. On a micro level, it, explores how the presence or absence of trust can shift the perception of our individual realities.
Trust is a fundamental element of our society. Politics, economics, and our whole modern system are not material realities – they are psychological constructs based on the trust in individuals, in institutions, in the market. We decide to believe in the value of money, to undertake social changes only if we trust the inventions of our collective imagination.
video

ALEXANDRA DEMENTIEVA

Drama House
File Festival
“Drama house” is a house when the simple ring at the doorbell can have unpredictable consequences; event, one is stranger then another and in the same time all, what happens with habitants belongs to everyday life. Sometimes these circumstances are a little bit exaggerated. Spectator stands in front of low fence with a door-gate. There are 8 doorbells on it. The act of ringing provokes an action in an apartment window. Based on chance and the choices that viewers make, the project explores the contemporary trends in the construction of a narrative and the interplay between diverse informative sub-layers effected through the impact of digital, non-linear media. It also questions the very process of story telling and at the same time considers the way of audience reading. It investigates the differences of individual and collective perception. In other words, the sequence and choices that each viewer selects reflect his own perspectives and behavioral patterns, thus makes the viewer much more than an active participant. By interacting with the installation the viewer is engaged in the creative process: re-telling the ever-changing story through the utilization of the primary capability of the digitization: reshaping the information. Therefore, each participant walks away with a unique, slightly different vision, each shaped according to his own choices and directions. Interactive media and the digital environment of the DH and its narrative function through a recognizable metaphor that makes access to the information meaningful: a house as a conceptual society model and an apartment as a private space. This reference transforms the objects and stories in the project into the metaphors and reminds us of the art cultural function: as a site of memory of the social collective imagination and as a site of representation and power.

Refik Anadol

Machine Hallucinations — Sphere

The artwork presents a series of AI Data Sculptures that incorporates vivid pigments, shapes, and patterns, aiming to create a collective, meditative, and multisensory experience. This immersive experience simulates the rhythms of various environments and invites the visitors to imagine alternative realities constructed by invisible data movements around them.
Machine Hallucination: The Sphere features dynamic visualizations of data that are based on vast archives containing visual imageries of space and nature while celebrating the unique architecture of The Sphere. For this project, Anadol and his team used these themed datasets as the building blocks for the three distinct chapters of the artwork and trained a unique AI model with subsets of the collected image archives. After the training, when idle and unsupervised, the “machine mind” generates new aesthetic visuals and color combinations through unique lines drawn by algorithmic connections.

Refik Anadol

Quantum Memories: Nature Studies
Technological and digital advancements of the past century could as well be defined by the humanity’s eagerness to make machines go to places that humans could not go, including the spaces inside our minds and the non-spaces of our un- or sub-conscious acts. These unique pieces of the “Quantum Memories” series exhibit arresting visuals and colors that speculate the probability of reaching invisible spaces. They are composed in collaboration with a generative algorithm enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing, a new form of computing that exploits the unusual physics of the subatomic world. It turns the visual data that flows around us into an artwork that represents our collective and digitized memories of nature and encourages the viewer to imagine the potential of this computing technology for the future of art, design, and architecture.

Refik Anadol

Machine Hallucination
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. The project focuses on latent cinematic experiences derived from representations of urban memories as they are re-imagined by machine intelligence. 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. 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. 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.

Shu Lea Cheang

Avatar of the artist
Taiwan in Venice 2019
“For those who don’t know her, Shu Lea Cheang is a figure of Net art and the cyberfeminist movement that emerged in the 1990s. Living in New York at the time, she was also an active member of the activist video collective Paper Tiger Television (as was French filmmaker Nathalie Magnan). Since then, Cheang’s work has dealt with “concerns including sex, futures, gender, ecology, money, media, and food [to] encompass film, installation, online work, social processes, and direct intervention in the sociopolitical, technical and aesthetic systems, and the imaginaries which co-compose them,” writes Matthew Fuller