At the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, ‘Refik Anadol: Unsupervised’ is an exhibition that has garnered both praise and criticism. This unique twenty-four-foot-square exhibit is a constantly shifting digital abstraction, which captivates visitors on the ground floor. Anadol, who hails from Turkey and is based in Los Angeles, is a digital artist with a notable reputation. He has worked with esteemed partners such as NASA, but his most important collaborator in this exhibit is an Artificial Intelligence system. The AI generates the exhibit’s imagery using tens of thousands of photographs of artwork from the museum’s collection as its data set.
Anadol has compared the process of creating this exhibit to ‘painting with data’. However, it is not a replication of a known painting, like a Jackson Pollock or Starry Night. Instead, the algorithms combine the archive to create a hallucinatory primordial soup presented in three distinct styles. The most striking of these styles generates cresting waves of rainbow-colored fluid that have a somewhat unsettling amusement park feel. The other two styles are far subtler and feature delicate lines woven together, providing a captivating experience of watching the artwork come to life.
Despite the exhibit’s success, there have been some critics who have criticized Anadol’s involvement in NFTs. It is worth noting, though, that a portion of the profits from an NFT series based on ‘Unsupervised’ benefits the museum. Additionally, some critics have dismissed machine-assisted art as inferior to traditional art forms, but this is not a new phenomenon. For example, color photography was not considered a true art form until 1976 when MOMA mounted a show on the subject. Artists have been incorporating computers into their work since the mid-fifties, but the spotlight on this genre is long overdue. The condescension towards machine-assisted art has existed for as long as the technology has, but as with all new art forms, it will take time for it to be fully accepted.
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