Exploring the Poetics of Data and Machine Intelligence

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Power of Imagination
3. The Poetics of Data
4. Exploring Connections through Machine Intelligence
5. Remembering and Transmitting Knowledge
6. Can a Building Learn? Can it Dream?
7. Inside the Mind of a Machine
8. Conclusion

The Power of Imagination

As a media artist, Refik Anadol uses data as a pigment and paints with a thinking brush that is assisted by artificial intelligence. He collaborates with machines to make buildings dream and hallucinate, using architectural spaces as canvases. Anadol's work is inspired by the power of imagination, which he first witnessed as a child growing up in Istanbul. One day, his mother brought home a videocassette of the science-fiction movie "Blade Runner," and he was mesmerized by the stunning architectural vision of the future of Los Angeles. This vision became a staple of his daydreams, and when he arrived in LA in 2012 for a graduate program in Design Media Arts, he rented a car and drove downtown to see that wonderful world of the near future.

The Question of AI in the 21st Century

One of Anadol's inspirations has been the question of what it means to be an AI in the 21st century. Any android or AI machine is only intelligent as long as we collaborate with it. It can construct things that human intelligence intends to produce but does not have the capacity to do so. If machines can learn or process memories, can they also dream, hallucinate, involuntarily remember, or make connections between multiple people's dreams? Does being an AI in the 21st century simply mean not forgetting anything? And, if so, isn't it the most revolutionary thing that we have experienced in our centuries-long effort to capture history across media?

The Poetics of Data

Anadol's Studio was established in 2014, and he invited architects, computer and data scientists, neuroscientists, musicians, and even storytellers to join him in realizing his dreams. The very first question they asked was, "Can data become a pigment?" This was the starting point for their Journey to embed media arts into architecture and to collide virtual and physical worlds. They began to imagine what Anadol would call the poetics of data.

Virtual Depictions

One of their first projects, "Virtual Depictions," was a public data sculpture piece commissioned by the city of San Francisco. The work invites the audience to be part of a spectacular aesthetic experience in a living urban space by depicting a fluid network of connections of the city itself. It also stands as a reminder of how invisible data from our everyday lives, like the Twitter feeds that are represented here, can be made visible and transformed into sensory knowledge that can be experienced collectively.

Wind-Data Paintings

When exploring connections through the vast potential of machine intelligence, Anadol and his team also pondered the connection between human senses and the machines' capacity for simulating nature. These inquiries began while working on wind-data paintings. They took the Shape of visualized poems Based on Hidden data sets that they collected from wind sensors. They then used generative algorithms to transform wind speed, gust, and direction into an ethereal data pigment. The result was a meditative yet speculative experience.

Bosphorus

This kinetic data sculpture, titled "Bosphorus," was a similar attempt to question our capacity to reimagine natural occurrences. Using high-frequency radar collections of the Marmara Sea, they collected sea-surface data and projected its dynamic movement with machine intelligence. They created a Sense of immersion in a calm yet constantly changing synthetic sea view.

Exploring Connections through Machine Intelligence

Anadol's projects Delve deeper into remembering and transmitting knowledge. They thought more about how memories were not static recollections but ever-changing interpretations of past events. They pondered how machines could simulate unconscious and subconscious events, such as dreaming, remembering, and hallucinating.

Archive Dreaming

In 2017, they discovered an open-source library of cultural documents in Istanbul and began working on "Archive Dreaming," one of the first AI-driven public installations in the world. It explores approximately 1.7 million documents that span 270 years. One of their inspirations during this process was a short story called "The Library of Babel" by the Argentine Writer Jorge Luis Borges. In the story, the author conceives a Universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set. Through this inspiring image, they imagine a way to physically explore the vast archives of knowledge in the age of machine intelligence. The resulting work was a user-driven immersive space that profoundly transformed the experience of a library in the age of machine intelligence.

Machine Hallucination

"Machine Hallucination" is an exploration of time and space experienced through New York City's public photographic archives. For this one-of-a-kind immersive project, they deployed machine-learning algorithms to find and process over 100 million photographs of the city. They designed an innovative narrative system to use artificial intelligence to predict or to hallucinate new images, allowing the viewer to step into a dreamlike Fusion of past and future New York.

Remembering and Transmitting Knowledge

As Anadol's projects delve deeper into remembering and transmitting knowledge, they thought more about how memories were not static recollections but ever-changing interpretations of past events. They pondered how machines could simulate unconscious and subconscious events, such as dreaming, remembering, and hallucinating.

Melting Memories

Thus, they created "Melting Memories" to Visualize the moment of remembering. The inspiration came from a tragic event when Anadol found out that his uncle was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. At that time, all he could think about was to find a way to celebrate how and what we remember when We Are still able to do so. He began to think of memories not as disappearing but as melting or changing shape. With the help of machine intelligence, they worked with the scientists at the Neuroscape Laboratory at the University of California, who showed them how to understand brain signals as memories are made. Although Anadol's own uncle was losing the ability to process memories, the artwork generated by EEG data explored the materiality of remembering and stood as a tribute to what his uncle had lost.

Can a Building Learn? Can it Dream?

Almost nothing about contemporary LA matched Anadol's childhood expectation of the city, with the exception of one amazing building: the Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry, one of his all-time heroes. In 2018, he had a call from the LA Philharmonic, who was looking for an installation to help mark the celebrated symphony's hundred-year anniversary. For this, they decided to ask the question, "Can a building learn? Can it dream?" To answer this question, they decided to Collect everything recorded in the archives of the LA Phil and WDCH. By using machine intelligence, the entire archive, going back 100 years, became projections on the building's skin, 42 projectors to achieve this futuristic public experience in the heart of Los Angeles, getting one step closer to the LA of "Blade Runner." If ever a building could dream, it was in this moment.

Inside the Mind of a Machine

Anadol is currently fully immersed in the data universe of every single curated TED Talk from the past 30 years. That means this data set includes 7,705 Talks from the TED stage. Those talks have been translated into 7.4 million seconds, and each second is represented here in this data universe. Every image that You are seeing in here represents unique moments from those talks. By using machine intelligence, they processed a total of 487,000 sentences into 330 unique clusters of topics like nature, global emissions, extinction, race issues, computation, trust, emotions, Water, and refugees. These clusters are then connected to each other by an algorithm, generated 113 million line segments, which reveal new conceptual relationships.

Conclusion

For Anadol, being inside the mind of countless great thinkers, as well as a machine, interacting with various feelings attributed to learning, remembering, questioning, and imagining all at the same time, is indeed what it means to be an AI in the 21st century. It is in our hands, humans, to train this mind to learn and remember what we can only dream of.