Machine Hallucination | Behind the Scenes

MACHINE HALLUCINATION
Refik Anadol
New York City | September 6th, 2019 - February 2nd, 2020

For the inaugural installation at ARTECHOUSE NYC, we collaborated with renowned media artist Refik Anadol to present his first large-scale installation in New York City and his first to utilize artificial intelligence (AI).

By deploying machine learning algorithms on one of the world’s largest datasets — over 100 million architectural images of New York City — Anadol created a cinematic data universe of the city’s collective memories and their AI re-imaginings that we helped transform into an immersive, technologically-unprecedented experience of the city’s deeply-hidden consciousness.

“I feel privileged to be chosen as the inaugural artist for ARTECHOUSE’s newest space. I’m especially proud to be the first to reimagine this historic building, which is more than 100 years old. By employing machine intelligence to help narrate the hybrid relationship between architecture and our perception of time and space, Machine Hallucination offers the audience a glimpse into the future of architecture itself.” – Refik Anadol

By embedding photography within artificial intelligence, this mixed-reality experiment revealed the hidden connections between unique moments in the city’s iconic architectural history and created “hallucinations” in 1025 latent dimensions of its near future — narrating the fluid consciousness of the city and displaying cultural information in a way that allowed visitors to realize the complex fabric that unfolds their present realities.