Installation by Refik Anadol and Mike Tyka explores data and machine learning, letting you examine 1.7 million documents, their information and connections, but when idle it visualizes ‘dreams’ of documents with neural networks:
Commissioned to work with SALT Research collections, artist Refik
Anadol employed machine learning algorithms to search and sort relations
among 1,700,000 documents. Interactions of the multidimensional data
found in the archives are, in turn, translated into an immersive media
installation. Archive Dreaming, which is presented as part of The Uses
of Art: Final Exhibition with the support of the Culture Programme of
the European Union, is user-driven; however, when idle, the installation
“dreams” of unexpected correlations among documents. The resulting
high-dimensional data and interactions are translated into an
architectural immersive space.
Shortly after receiving the commission, Anadol was a resident artist
for Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence Program where he closely
collaborated with Mike Tyka and explored cutting-edge developments in
the field of machine intelligence in an environment that brings together
artists and engineers. Developed during this residency, his
intervention Archive Dreaming transforms the gallery space on floor -1
at SALT Galata into an all-encompassing environment that intertwines
history with the contemporary, and challenges immutable concepts of the
archive, while destabilizing archive-related questions with machine
learning algorithms.
In this project, a temporary immersive architectural space is created
as a canvas with light and data applied as materials. This radical
effort to deconstruct the framework of an illusory space will transgress
the normal boundaries of the viewing experience of a library and the
conventional flat cinema projection screen, into a three dimensional
kinetic and architectonic space of an archive visualized with machine
learning algorithms. By training a neural network with images of
1,700,000 documents at SALT Research the main idea is to create an
immersive installation with architectural intelligence to reframe
memory, history and culture in museum perception for 21st century
through the lens of machine intelligence.
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