US – The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has unveiled three new digital artworks, one of which is a striking 24 feet by 24 feet digital display filling its lobby. On view until March 2023, the work, Unsupervised by Turkish artist Refik Anadol, uses AI to flow a constantly shifting display of forms, drawing on more than 200 years of art from the museum’s collection.
In 2021, Anadol created an online exhibition on art platform Feral File, for which he trained a machine learning model to interpret data from MoMA’s collection. For this installation at MoMA, Anadol has revised the artworks he made in 2021 to incorporate real-time input from the surrounding environment – changes in light, movement, volume and the weather – which, in turn, affect the continuously changing imagery.
‘This project reshapes the relationship between the physical and the virtual, the real and the unreal,’ says Michelle Kuo, the Marlene Hess curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA. ‘Often, AI is used to classify, process and generate realistic representations of the world. Anadol’s work, by contrast, is visionary: it explores dreams, hallucination and irrationality, posing an alternative understanding of modern art and of art-making itself.’ Read more about this in our upcoming AI creativity analysis and in our microtrend The Awe Economy.
Strategic opportunity
Is AI imagery art? The question should be: how does AI change the nature of art – and creativity too? Be prepared for AI-influenced visual aesthetics to arise and consider what creative opportunities AI will pose for your business