Internationally renowned media artist Refik Anadol’s groundbreaking approach to AI-based immersive
data narratives takes the audience on a mesmerizing journey of light, movement, and color in Machine Hallucinations: The Sphere at The Sphere. The artwork presents a series of AI Data Sculptures that incorporates vivid pigments, shapes, and patterns, aiming to create a collective, meditative, and multisensory experience. This immersive experience simulates the rhythms of various environments and invites the visitors to imagine alternative realities constructed by invisible data movements around them.

Machine Hallucinations is an ongoing exploration of data aesthetics based on collective visual memories of space, nature, and urban environments. Since the inception of the project during his 2016 during Google AMI Residency, Anadol has been utilizing machine intelligence as a collaborator to human consciousness, specifically DCGAN, PGAN, StyleGAN and Generative AI algorithms trained on these vast datasets to reveal unrecognized layers of our external realities.

Machine Hallucination: The Sphere features dynamic visualizations of data that are based on vast archives containing visual imageries of space and nature while celebrating the unique architecture of The Sphere. For this project, Anadol and his team used these themed datasets as the building blocks for the three distinct chapters of the artwork and trained a unique AI model with subsets of the collected image archives. After the training, when idle and unsupervised, the “machine mind” generates new aesthetic visuals and color combinations through unique lines drawn by algorithmic connections.

Machine Hallucinations: The Sphere reveals a spectacular series of synesthetic reality experiments based on Generative AI algorithms and turn these datasets into latent multi-sensory experiences to highlight the beauty of The Sphere’s architecture. The fluidity of the visual patterns not only performs a digital synthesis of data, but also represents the many interlocking layers of nature, humanity, and technology in our age of global mobility and machine intelligence

“In 2016, during my artist residency at Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence (AMI) program, I coined the terms ‘AI Data Painting’ and ‘AI Data Sculpture’ as a way to encapsulate a groundbreaking exploration into the creative capacities of artificial intelligence. This concept was born from a profound curiosity: if a machine can learn, can it also dream? Can it hallucinate? These questions propelled my artistic inquiry, leading to the development of visual works that transcend traditional art forms. By harnessing vast datasets and AI algorithms, I sought to visualize the dreams of machines, creating ethereal landscapes that blur the line between the digital and the physical. AI Data Painting thus represents not just a new technique, but a philosophical pondering on the evolving relationship between human creativity and machine intelligence, inviting viewers to contemplate the potential for AI to not only mimic reality but to imagine beyond it.”