Machine Hallucinations – NYC

The question of why we collect, record, and share our quotidian experiences has always been entangled with the formal and aesthetic concerns about how to represent reality, totality, and the depth of human imagination. Nineteenth century poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé famously said that everything in the world existed to end up in a book. Revisiting Mallarmé’s proposition in her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography, Susan Sontag wrote, “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” More recently, Jonathan Zittrain, the co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and society, suggested that “internet architecture” lacked a definable center and instead relied on “an extraordinary collective hallucination.”

Refik Anadol’s most recent synesthetic reality experiments deeply engage with these centuries-old questions and attempt at revealing new connections between visual narrative, archival instinct and collective consciousness. The project focuses on latent cinematic experiences derived from representations of urban memories as they are re-imagined by machine intelligence. For Artechouse’s New York location, Anadol presents a data universe of New York City in 1025 latent dimensions that he creates by deploying machine learning algorithms on over 100 million photographic memories of New York City found publicly in social networks. Machine Hallucination — NYC thus generates a novel form of synesthetic storytelling through its multilayered manipulation of a vast visual archive beyond the conventional limits of the camera and the existing cinematographic techniques.

Commissioned by ARTECHOUSE and created by Refik Anadol, Machine Hallucination: NYC is a time and space exploration into New York City’s past and potential future. This completely immersive exhibition is of New York, by New York and for New York — a fitting tribute to one of the world’s greatest cities and architectural marvels. Exploring New York through the mind of a machine, Machine Hallucination: NYC aims to uncover the ever-changing shape of the city, evoking our collective memory and the ways that new forms of visual representation can alter our perception of this iconic destination.

Exhibition dates: November 2, 2021 - January 17, 2022

Release Date: Feb. 15, 202

Editions of 1.