Thoughts on Refik Anadol at the Serpentine Gallery.
Refik is a new media artist and designer who really burst onto the scene around 2018 with large-scale fluid simulations with an anamorphic frame designed into the animation.
His practice seems to be based on using deep learning to create stimuli for animations.
His work Machine Hallucinations was recently on display at the Moma and was also acquired. That piece was based on the entire collection of the Moma.
This show at the Serpentine Gallery in London is the premiere of Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive. Timed ticketed entry. Cost - Free.
Going in, I expected large screens with amorphous "blobs" flying around. It delivered.
Giant wall projections - Three sides of the interior of the gallery walls were filled with projections. Some looked like a swirling mass.
Then, others showed photographs of orchids and flowers. They all looked a little "alien" in their approach. Knowing a little of the work, I understood them to be AI-composed based on some sort of training data.
This thought was confirmed when the projections occasionaly changed to show thousands of individual photographs.
Inside the gallery were two other rooms.
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One had lots of beanbags for guests to lay on as the projection screen in this room was mounted to the ceiling. The animations changed between the blobs (we like the blobs) to strange, almost warped A.I. versions of grizzly bears. It was a little cramped and busy in here.
The last room contained screens showing works—the more familiar "blob" like flowing animations. What I loved about these rooms was the doorway "framing" the other walls.
The final wall in the space showed some of the process and meaning behind the works. I really enjoyed seeing this peek behind the curtain.
All good art should evoke emotions that elicit a feeling.
The scale of the work was monumental, so it definitely triggered awe. But after that, it honestly made me confused and quite sad. Perhaps I misunderstood the art, but training an A.I. on thousands of images of the natural world and then asking the A.I. to hallucinate those images left me cold. It's a technical exercise. It definitely left me to appreciate the natural world more, but surely any well-curated nature photography exhibition can do this.
Training these A.I. systems takes up an enormous amount of energy and resources. I was just left concerned about why an artist would go to all these lengths. Perhaps I missed the point, but then that's a failure in the curation of the art. I spent a reasonable amount of time studying the film that tried to explain the works.
I think I enjoy more aesthetic works with no meaning. It's just take it for what it is. There's this trend in data visualization works to explain the "data." Perhaps it's best not to know.
Refik and his team are enormously talented, and I look forward to seeing where his practice goes.
Overall, I recommend seeing the show if you are in the London Hyde Park area. It's impressive. It might leave you cold. It's running till April 7th.
Digital visual artist since 1981, National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. Emmy Award-winning designer/director
8 个月AI-generated images rely on a language-based system that creates composites of pre-existing images constrained by the finite vocabulary of languages. Although AI can improve applied arts by efficiently meeting client demands, its limited lexicon restricts personal expression in fine art. Fine art embodies an artist's unique and constantly evolving instincts, subconscious, intuition, and imagination, enabling them to visually communicate the unutterable. Because of its verbal restrictions, AI produces images and artificial art.
creative coder
9 个月I felt the same when attending the exhibition, I am grateful that an artist working with AI is being exhibited at a leading gallery such as the Seperntine. However the work lacked a level of depth / meaning & storytelling for me.
STAH, Cinello, Anthropology of Religion MSc, Art and Spirituality Researcher, Photographer and Painter. HICAT Holistic Coach and Psych K? Facilitator. For a lighter side of me go on Instagram: @annalisa_burello
9 个月I went this afternoon. It didn’t leave me cold. Rather relaxed. I spent a good half hour watching the projection on the ceiling, lying on a bean bag. My mind too was trying to figure out why I found the AI moving images so entrancing. I couldn’t really find a reason, but it made me think of diversity and the evolutionary process. In a way AI combines in infinite ways different forms of life, showing that there are infinite genetic combinations. The avatar landscapes on the wall screens made me think that perhaps at some point Earth did have those ecosystems. We just don’t know. And perhaps we carry the memory of those dead ecosystems in our genes and our molecular memory. Unlike conceptual art, this ‘emotive’ art excites our aesthetic imagination. Perhaps a thoughtless state of mind is the best way to appreciate it. After Anadol I walked to the other Serpentine Gallery. Confronted with text, letters, monochrome and political messages, I turned around and left after one minute. I didn’t want Kruger to pollute my ecstatic state of mind with ugly and repulsive ideas.