REFIK ANADOL & ALICE SCOPE - NEUE HOUSE
NATURE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
As part of FRIEZE LA, there are talks, installations, and events taking place all over town. We were lucky enough to attend a NEUE HOUSE talk with artist Refik Anadol, curator Alice Scope and author Dorka Kheen.
The conversation explored the unexpected relationship of Artifical Intelligence and new creative technologies.
Anadol talked about his love of LA and California. He mentioned his appreciation of the open engagement of people on the streets and how public art is the most sastisfying for him personally. No gallery needed, no middle, no end, no bias, everyone is included in the experience.
Anyone who saw his work projected on Disney Hall in 2018 would agree. Anadol makes data beautiful!
He utilises machine intelligence to continually reshape the relationship of architecture and the digital world.
The Sphere - Machine Hallucinations. Courtesy of Refik Anadol Studio
After working for 16 years with data as a tool, and 8 years with Artifical Intelligence, the studio is now turning their attention to one of the most important things in our lives, nature. Anadol is creating the world’s first AI nature model.
A funny story - he was asked by Google to create a residency and if he wanted to work with the world’s best AI engineer. He thought that conversation would get boring very quickly. Instead he asked that the dialogue should include an AI engineer, a neuroscientist, an artist and a shaman!
The most important thing for Anadol is not so much the process but the meaning and purpose of the work. Anadol believes that one day soon, data will be treated as a pigment that does not dry, he coined the term “data pigmentation.”
What is uppermost in his mind, is not so much the process, but what you do with this artistic tool and why you are doing it. Furthermore nothing can replace experiencing a human moment together, simultaneously. This is why he is so drawn to public art.
Where Anadol has a global perspective, Alice Scope talked about a home grown project she co-curated with Zandie Brockett ‘River, Like Ourselves: What is the Encoding of Intelligence?’ The exhibition featured the work of Alice Bucknell who created THE ALLUVIALS VIDEO GAME
Gameplay teaser for the final level, Fire Walk With Me. From The Alluvials ©Alice Bucknell
Bucknell explains her game on her website as follows “The Alluvials is a video work and playable game that explores the politics of drought and water scarcity in a near-future version of Los Angeles.
The story is told through a variety of nonhuman and elemental perspectives, including the Los Angeles River, wildfire, a 400-year-old sycamore called El Aliso, and the ghost of the city's celebrity mountain lion, P-22.
Through the emergent practice of worlding, or the co-construction of new worlds with human, nonhuman, and machine intelligence, The Alluvials expands on the idea that the end of an anthropocentric world-view is not the end of the world.”
Anadol and Scope are both interested in the use of data to create AI fuelled artistic moments that have true meaning. Scope through her curatorial powers, brings cutting edge artists into the spotlight. Anadol hopes to bring our focus back to nature, and give us a new respect for our origin story.
very laboratory