Refik Anadol: Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams

Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams is a long-term research project by Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) at the intersections of architecture, Artificial Intelligence-based digital art, and environmental aesthetics. The artwork is an AI data sculpture that draws upon a dataset of more than 300 million publicly available nature-related images of flowers, trees, mushrooms, landscapes, and clouds. This vast dataset is processed through a custom software developed by Anadol’s studio. A multisensory architectural exhibition of synesthetic reality experiments based on algorithms, Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams commemorates the inherent beauty of the planet Earth.

Each chapter of Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams visualizes a different cluster of images that represent one’s relationship to nature. “Floral Pigmentations” utilizes images of flowers, challenging perceptions of flora outside their natural habitat, whether in an urban location, a computer screen, or a traditional art context. “Forest Simulations” can be considered a radical visualization of an alternate dimension of the natural world. For “Perennial Pigmentation,” Anadol employs a thinking brush to show how human-machine collaborations can help us experience colors of nature in new ways. The “Earth Simulations” series is derived from a generative adversarial network (GAN), interpolating between different landscapes. Though these intricate and abstracted layers of machine-generated imagery suggest a connection with a cosmos of unimaginable data, the natural pigments offer a tangible relationship to material.