Art from data: When machines hallucinate – culture

Every now and then art takes a while before it can do something with the new technologies. But when the critical mass of ideas, progress and context has been reached, a new chapter in cultural history has often begun long before it is defined. The first basic work on digital art has just been published. “The Age of Data” is the name of the band. The publisher, designer and author is Christoph Grünberger, who works as an art director for large companies and brands. And right at the front of the cover art already shows what it can do now. You can see the tiny figure of a viewer in front of a data sculpture by Refik Anadol. He has become something like the Jeff Koons of digital art, with ubiquitous monumental installations around the world and a visual language that is as simple as it is recognizable. In addition, an aesthetic that is more overwhelming than demanding.

Refik Anadol was born in Istanbul. He still retains his warm, Mediterranean accent, even though he’s lived in Los Angeles for almost ten years. His way of working is complex. He deconstructs data sets such as the Twitter usage of the city of San Francisco, the weather data of the Sea of ​​Marmara or entire image archives and feeds them into an artificial intelligence, which then creates his moving images from them. A bit like the fractals of the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot, complex calculations are made visible. At Anadol, however, these AI installations look like lava, like time-lapse flowers or spray that seem to take hold of the space. His inspiration was a movie scene he saw as a kid: the moment on Blade Runner when android Rachael realizes her memories are not her own, and Rick Deckard tells her that they are implants of her designer’s niece .

Technology is finally far enough to go beyond electronics in art

Anadol plays with this motif of the machine that creates new images from memories, in ever new variations, which he introduces in the book. For example, he processed the city archive of Istanbul. For the 100th anniversary of the Los Angeles Philharmonics, he turned 77 terabytes of archival material from 100 years into a work that was projected onto the Disney Concert Hall. For his current exhibition in the König Galerie in Berlin, he processed the city’s wind data, among other things. “Data are my pixels, architecture my canvas,” is how he once described his work.

Anadol doesn’t come from art. He studied design. Just like Grünberger, he doesn’t have much to do with art history. Accordingly, “The Age of Data” has grown organically rather than planned. Two years ago Grünberger published “Analoge Algorithmen”, a workbook for designers that deals with the new formal languages ​​that arise on and in computers. The discussions resulted in more and more interviews with around 40 artists and collectives who create works that stand for themselves from such formal languages. “They all had time in lockdown,” says Grünberger. He’s just reporting from Zwiesel in Lower Bavaria, where he works, because as an art director it doesn’t really matter where you are in the world. And because he finances the production of the book through Kickstarter, word quickly got around that he was working on a basic work there. “I would have people for volume two, three and four,” he says. “Many would have liked to have been there.” It was then published by Niggli, a Swiss specialist publisher for architecture, design and typography.

The subtitle also suggests that the boundaries between art and design are just dissolving in this area: “Embracing Algorithms in Art & Design”. The embrace of algorithms in art and design.

The list of new names that appear in the book and that could be remembered is as global as it is idiosyncratic. In addition to people like Brendan Dawes, Shohei Fujimoto, Lotte Stöver and Tina Touli, there are collectives with idiosyncratic names like WHITEvoid, .Defasten or RANDOM INTERNATIONAL.

The visual languages ​​are as different as the approaches. The only common thread is the raw material: data. A second commonality is the tendency to make architecture part of the works. Not just through projections. For the video for the electro piece “Terminal Slam” by Squarepusher, for example, the Japanese designer Daito Manabe from the Rhizomatiks collective transformed the cityscape of Tokyo into a digital space in which data comes to life in time with the electro beats. At first it is only raw data that take on more and more shape and finally break out of the glass façade like the spines of a puffer fish. Others, like the Düsseldorf artist Ralf Baecker, literally take the space and install the data streams as physical objects. Christopher Bauder and his Berlin studio WHITEvoid reshape architecture with light.

As different as the visual languages ​​are, there are a few strands that run through the work. On the one hand, there is technology, which has finally reached a point where it can keep up with the ideas of art. What digital art has suffered from for a long time (and still does in far too many cases) is the awkward, unfinished, and fuzzy technology that was not yet fully developed. For a long time, all of this did not keep up with the shimmering surfaces of the digital world and often looked unsuccessful. Or there were technologies that were designed by engineers and programmers, whose art did not reach the artistic, aesthetic or intellectual level to go beyond electronic tips.

Now, however, machine learning, storage capacities and user interfaces have reached a point where not only engineers and programmers can handle them. For his work “Quantum Memories”, Refik Anadol used the algorithms of Google Quantum AI.

Important: machines themselves cannot be creative – they still need people for that

The other thing that many of the works in the volume have in common are the organic forms that emerge when data, AI and art come together to create something new. The streams of data develop in ever new movements that are familiar despite all the strangeness. And yes, the images have to move, since algorithms are those instructions that fill machines with something like life, that make them see, hear, evaluate and make decisions. A form of being, as the robotist Murray Shanahan put it, which is still alien to us and which determines our life more and more clearly.

Whereby one thing is important to Christoph Grünberger: “The machine can only learn what it is supposed to do through iteration,” he says. “Machines themselves cannot be creative.” Refik Anadol agrees, too, who says that the visualization of what machines do with the memories of other people, people, only works because people are also teaching the machines that.

In this way, however, people can also visualize their images of the inner workings of the machines, the digital spaces in cyberspace and in the metaverse, of the matrix of data that surrounds them more and more closely. So it’s no wonder that people in Berlin are waiting in long lines to watch Refik Anadol’s “Machine Hallucinations”.

Because digital art is finally becoming a chronicler of a present in which technology has passed into a sphere of abstraction that people only understand when something has gone wrong again.

Christoph Grünberger: “The Age of Data – Embracing Algorithms in Art & Design”. Niggli Verlag, Zurich, 2021. 400 pages, 68 euros.

Refik Anadol: “Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams”. Until Friday, December 17th, in the König Galerie Nave, Alexandrinenstraße 118-121, Berlin. Info and videos: www.koeniggalerie.com