On a curved LED screen about 12 feet high and 40 feet wide, shape-shifting digital forms in blazing oranges, reds and yellows blossom and dissolve into one another like flowers from an otherworldly garden.
This isn’t a hallucination. It’s “Archive Dreaming,” an immersive installation by Refik Anadol, a Turkish-American media artist known for synthesizing machine intelligence and data visualization to create public art, often at monumental scale….
For the past several years, Anadol’s creations have emerged from his studio’s “Large Nature Model,” an original AI system trained entirely on nature data such as high-resolution images, field recordings and biosensor signals. Via prompting and autonomous processes, the model transforms data into dynamic AI data paintings the artist hopes will inspire a fresh view of the natural world.
“Nature is the most inspiring thing we have as humanity from many, many perspectives,” Anadol said in an interview. “In the Encyclopedia of Life, there are more than 2.2 million entries of species we discovered, but it’s very hard to see the big picture.”….
For the installation at Oxford, he turned to the university’s Herbaria, a vast collection of botanical specimens, images and illustrations dating from the mid-17th century onward that’s used for research, teaching and taxonomy.
His team generated AI-generated videos from Herbaria images by prompting a diffusion model. These systems slowly refine random visual noise into a coherent image based on patterns learned from data.
But the mesmerizing colors and shapes that swirl through “Archive Dreaming” do more than evoke nature’s grandeur and mystery. They also point to technology’s potential for turning static repositories of information into something that lives and thinks, according to Anadol.
“It’s like nature as a mind,” he said. “Archives are generally frozen entities. With machine intelligence, we are trying to rewire our understanding of how [they] could be imagined.”….
Anadol co-founded Dataland, billed as the first museum dedicated to AI art. It’s set to open June 20 at the Grand LA, an entertainment and residential development in downtown Los Angeles designed by Frank Gehry.
“Denying all AI technologies as an artistic medium will not protect art, it just limits it,” Anadol said. “The artists who embrace new tools don’t replace the old masters. They just join them.”
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