Heading to New York this winter season? There is an artwork on display here that you can’t miss seeing. Seriously.
While walking through the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York I entered a colorful world where art and technology meet. There is a relationship between the physical and the virtual, much like the real and the unreal. This is the feeling that Turkish new media artist Refik Anadol’s latest project, “Unsupervised,” evokes.
Anadol's work continuously generates new forms by mediating between technology, creativity and modern art on a large-scale media wall measuring approximately 24 × 24 feet (7 meters x 7 meters) in the museum’s ground-floor Gund Lobby.
I started to take in the mesmerizing artwork by diving into the famed artist's machine-based visual speculations, which also mark another breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI) as an artistic tool. The exhibition undoubtedly succeeds in merging the physical and digital worlds as the artist uses AI to interpret and transform more than 200 years of art MoMA’s collection, which I found to be the most memorable aspect of the show.
The installation features three new digital artworks by Anadol. Within that frame, "Unsupervised" has been effective as have Anadol’s latest artworks though it is impossible to put into words how so.
His artwork is like a rumination on technology. I learned that Anadol trained a sophisticated machine-learning model to interpret the publicly available data on MoMA’s collection. He is always trying to find ways to connect memories with the future and to make the invisible visible.
A side benefit of this great show is that it features a never-before-seen synesthetic reality experiment. Another point is the deep connections between abstract mathematics and art, which Anadol’s work concretely presents. On the other hand, Anadol describes his work as “optimistic science fiction,” an exploration of the machine’s potential to expand human capacity for imagination. And it does reveal the enormous potential for machines to handle images by visualizing these algorithmic processes, data universes and their strange branches.
At MoMA, Anadol takes visitors on a journey through time and makes it possible to feel fully immersed like never before by bringing stories from the past to the data universe. Whether you’re a New Yorker or a tourist, make your way to MoMA and begin your day with an immersive experience at Anadol’s “Unsupervised.” Immersive experiences are constantly transforming and provoking us in different ways.
Set to run until March, the installation is, surprisingly, Anadol’s first solo exhibit in North America.
“I think a lot about the use of public spaces,” Anadol said. “I first came to MoMA in 2011 and to be in this location, with 'Unsupervised,' is a great honor for me," he added.
Through the work, visitors are transformed into unwitting creators thanks to real-time inputs that Anadol has incorporated including movement, changes in light and the volume of sound.
