A New Car Just Might Change Your Mind About AI Art

“I think we is in rebirth,” says the artist Refik Anadol, in his optimistic voice, when asked how he sees this moment. art history, and artificial intelligence ascendant however, they are controversial as a medium. “We don’t have his name right now.”

Anadol, known for its technical installations that explore the relationship between humans and machines, has reason to be excited. On June 20, Dataland, a modern exhibition center in Los Angeles that collaborated with studio Efsun Erkılıç, opened its doors to interested people. Billed as the world’s “first museum of AI technology,” it welcomed more than 10,000 visitors to the inaugural exhibition in its first two weeks, Anadol tells WIRED.

Courtesy of Dataland

His piece is his most ambitious to date, a deep architectural vision called Machine Dreams: Rainforest. Its digital interface, responding directly to visitor movements and biometric data (followed by wearable devices), creates constantly changing images from Anadol’s Large Nature Model, an AI system built using natural science archives from famous research institutions such as the Smithsonian.

“For three years, we started from scratch and trained our AI models, and worked with our data,” Anadol said. He and his team went to the Amazon and other rainforests to capture things that would make this species look better. “We have 5 petabytes of value that we collected ourselves,” says Anadol. I am proud that Dataland has made a policy of obtaining this with permission and the participation of researchers, while the main AI companies of Silicon Valley have faced attacks and lawsuits for what many developers say is unlicensed, the use of additional content as education.

Anadol adds that Google DeepMind has given Dataland access to “low power” experiments, allowing the site to leverage them. running on Google Cloud and to maintain “regular calculations.” (Anadol has been associated with technology since becoming the first recipient of the Google Artists and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency in 2016.)

Ethical, environmental responsibility, and whole-hearted efforts to create what feels like living, breathing artificial intelligence: This commitment is essential if Anadol and Dataland want to redefine “artificial AI.” The same statement is a non-starter for many producers and critics of the reproductive “slop” that is filled with visuals at every level. Anadol is well aware of people who reject those things, and he does not blame them. “I mean, 100 percent, most of them are right,” he says, noting that when someone hears about AI technology, “their first thought is like, quick engineering, or a bunch of eight seconds.”