Machine Hallucinations -- Space: Metaverse is a breathtaking collection from digital media artist Refik Anadol. It includes richly diverse artworks inspired by his studio's collaboration with NASA JPL which began in early 2018, and his long-term research into the photographic history of space exploration. Using advanced machine learning algorithms trained specifically on photographs of deep space captured by satellites and spacecrafts throughout humanity's quest to explore its depths, Anadol creates mesmerizing visual speculations of the unknown. The works explore our fascination with the subject while unveiling intricate connections between obscurity and openness through both digital and physical mediums. Studying the visuals that have been captured by the most comprehensive machines sent to outer space inspired Anadol to contemplate the idea that telescopes keep visual travel journals of spaces where humans cannot yet travel.

NATURE DREAMS, designed specifically for KÖNIG GALERIE, comprises three novel aesthetic approaches to a vast photographic dataset of nature: A giant data sculpture displaying machine-generated, dynamic pigments of nature titled NATURE DREAMS, four new series of data paintings, and WINDS OF BERLIN, a site-specific, public art projection on the tower of ST. AGNES which will be created based on environmental real-time data collected from the city. Anadol is a pioneer in the world of rare digital art and crypto collectibles, minting the first fully immersive digital artwork NFT in September 2021. For KÖNIG GALERIE he creates unique NFT options: the AI data sculpture NATURE DREAMS, and his public projection, WINDS OF BERLIN, which will mark the first time a generative public artwork in Berlin to be offered in NFT form. An architectural exhibition of synesthetic reality experiments based on GAN algorithms developed by artificial intelligence and inspired by fluid dynamics, NATURE DREAMS turns datasets into latent multi-sensory experiences to commemorate the beauty of the earth we share.

This week, on the new-media platform Feral File, artist Refik Anadol presents Unsupervised, an exhibition of works created by training an artificial intelligence model with the public metadata of The Museum of Modern Art's collection. Spanning more than 200 years of art, from paintings to photography to cars to video games, the Museum's collection represents a unique data set for an artist who has worked with many different public archives. The AI-based abstract images and shapes in Unsupervised are interpretations of the Museum's wide-ranging collection, weighted toward the exhibition of new artworks at MoMA this fall. Starting with the exhibition opening on November 18, new artworks will be revealed and released over three days. Each work will be made available to collectors as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. MoMA curators Paola Antonelli and Michelle Kuo sat down with Anadol and Casey Reas, the artist-founder of Feral File, to talk about the ecology of mobile images, art in the age of mechanical learning, and the question: What if a machine tried to create "modern art"? This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Paola Antonelli: Refik, how did you start thinking of your Machine Hallucinations series, of which Unsupervised is a part? Refik Anadol: Five years ago, I was very fortunate to be one of the artists in residence at the Google Artists and Machine Intelligence program. This was the moment of DeepDream's development, the very first time we were witnessing AI algorithms making an impact on the art and technology communities.

The trick of Refik Anadol's Machine Hallucinations, a three-day public art installation at The Shed in New York City, is to transform the processing of data into surreal hypnosis. The immersive audiovisual exhibit towers over a cavernous 17,000 sq ft gallery in Hudson Yards, an outer ring of screens features a shimmering and chameleonic display of what looks like pixelated sand. But each square is a narrative of data: a familiar image – tree, building, lamppost, over 130m publicly available images of New York City searched and collected by Anadol and his team's algorithms – morphed into a single-colored square and then silenced by a single question: what would you do if you owned your data? The free exhibit, part of a $250m project to shift data ownership from private mega-corporations to individual users called Project Liberty, makes a tactile, sensory, emotional argument for data dignity and decentralization of internet power – concepts often so bogged down in technicality, abstraction and vagueness as to be inaccessible. The overarching aim of Project Liberty is to imagine an internet future not governed by tech CEOs, the forfeit of your data for participation, surveillance capitalism and the whims of social media companies aiming for infinite scale.

Daniel Ambrosi – "Dreamscapes" fuses computational photography and AI to create a deeply textural environment. Refik Anadol – "Machine Hallucinations," by the Turkish-born, Los Angeles-based conceptual artist known for his immersive architectural digital installations, such as a project at New York's Chelsea Market that used projectors to splash AI generated images based of New York cityscapes to create what Anadol called a "machine hallucination." Sofia Crespo and Dark Fractures – Work from the Argentina-born artist and Berlin-based studio led by Feileacan McCormick uses GANs and NLP models to generate 3D insects in a virtual, digital space. Scott Eaton – An artist, educator and creative technologist residing in London combines a deep understanding of human anatomy, traditional art techniques and modern digital tools in his uncanny, figurative artworks. Oxia Palus – The NVIDIA Inception startup will uncover a new masterpiece by Leonardo Da Vinci that resurrects a hidden sketch and reconstructs the painting style from one of the most famous artists of all time, DaVinci.