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Refik Anadol, 'Unsupervised', 2022

 


In a world where AI-generated art is 'burgeoning' according to Gareth Harris, the eye will increasingly witness these immersive, evolving, self-generating images that now percolate museums. Refik Anadol at MoMA in 2022-3 was no exception, a huge installation that was full of movement and change. Transforming the meta-data of the gallery of over two-hundred years of art, and creating a digital work inspired by his findings, Anadol's installation was designed to envelop the viewer walking into and through it as if consumed by it, or in the words of MoMA, a display that was truly 'visionary'. 

Anadol is just one artist collaborating with the machine to produce this generative art that could be our future. The fact that this was a popular exhibition at MoMA perhaps belies a growing institutional awareness and acceptance of these new methods. Certainly it seems to be the case elsewhere - the first 'original' work constructed through AI to come to auction was at Christie's in 2018, the Portrait of Edmond de Belamy which sold for an incredible $432,500. This has a dual implication - both institutional acceptance and market acceptance, which is key to the growth of any art form. This portrait was created from GAN algorithms by a Paris-based collective, so it is an example of a group of artists working with a machine to produce a lucrative product. The role of the human is currently crucial in AI-art - they design the algorithm and the machine steadily 'learns' (rather like a human would) to eventually create its images. Equally Anadol believes that the human is inseparable from his work and is very attached to the idea of 'human memory' in his creations. Unsupervised suggests this, as it is using the collection of MoMA, created by humans, as the base for developing the installation. Anadol's other work is in a similar vein and often relates to humanity's contact with nature, swiftly becoming a memory due to the impacts of climate change. Anadol's Coral Dreams was his version of creating artificial realities to preserve disappearing nature, and is very like Unsupervised in its swirling, ever-changing patterns on a wide screen for a viewer to immerse themselves within. 

Literature just about tolerates the growth of the digital in the realm of art history and the aesthetic. Particularly in the West however, the 'fear of the machine' has been a constant, and has impacted our viewing of art in the past. Artists in nineteenth century Britain desperately retaliated against the machine and returned to the past or traditional methods of production by hand in the Arts and Crafts Movement. Equally the rise of photography threatened the traditional modes of artistic production and painting had to expand to survive, breaking away from the strictly pictorial and into the realm of the abstract. The fact that photography has only relatively recently been accepted institutionally as an art form attests to this long term scepticism surrounding the machine. Now with the growth of digital humanities, the ever maturing algorithm and the production of AI-generated art, the traditional methods of artistic production are being called into question again. Will they once more adapt to survive? Or perhaps our 'period eye' will instead adapt to a mechanical, machine age that accepts non-human art on a level playing field, or even as capable of producing 'better' art, whatever that may mean. 

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