Unsupervised: Machine Hallucination by Refik Anadol is installed in a lobby of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised is a bad trip. It reminded me of my first bad trip, a Saturday morning in 1989 when I met my friends for breakfast, dropped acid, and went to the Art Institute of Chicago. You know that opening paragraph from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where Hunter S. Thompson lets you know when and where he could feel the drugs kicking in near Barstow? I could tell you that on that brisk fall morning in Chicago in a pre-internet world, I knew something was up when I emerged from the El station, walked into a Walgreens, and thought I had entered some kind of nineteenth-century phantasmagoria. I saw men with pointy beards and stovepipe hats! I saw corseted, straight-backed women with hair done up in twists, buns, and braids—but with no faces! Even scarier: lamps with goosenecked arms covered in fur! I only wanted a bottle of water. Once out of this sepia-toned nightmare, I ran away screaming—to a museum.
Towering inside MoMA’s Gund Lobby, Unsupervised is the latest of Anadol’s Machine Hallucination series. Turkish-born Anadol is somewhat of a sensation these days, the kind of high-profile crossover artist-cum-wunderkind that inspires both awe and indignation in critics. This is the case with his “artificial intelligence installations” that have been mounted in galleries or become the visual centerpiece of high-profile commissions of late. All share a sly yet highly attenuated gimmick, if that is the appropriate way to describe the way an artificial intelligence algorithm generates memories of its own visual sensorium. Some of these appear as puffy, nebula-like forms that cluster and dissipate into pixilated whorls within the screen that contains them. Others look like swatches of light that bend and twist in midair. They are undoubtedly beautiful, even beguiling. They all began life as NFTs on Feral File, an online exhibition space for digital art. And some have come to life in real spaces like MoMA’s Gund Lobby.
Like a revenant from a digital realm, Unsupervised inspired a feeling of dread similar to the one I felt on that fall morning in 1989. Imagine at MoMA, like I was, watching a controlled burst of images unfurl before your eyes. They are larger than life, larger than anything at the museum. I knew how these images were made for this specific installation—or at least I had a general inkling of the process. Anadol wrote an AI algorithm that scraped all the available data related to MoMA’s holdings. It then “interpreted” the data by creating its own leisurely, unsupervised (get it?) stroll through the collections. I suppose that this is what the continuous shape-shifting in Unsupervised is supposed to mimic. Imagine that you are alongside Anna Karina, Sami Frey, and Claude Brasseur, running as fast as you can through the Louvre just like in Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders. Something similar may happen with your own recollection of the holdings there. You may even experience them as you would a film. Streaks and fields of color blend and fade into each other with each successive replay, maybe even like the horizontal bands in Gerhard Richter’s Strip “paintings,” which are made of long, digitally printed strips mounted between an aluminum support and a layer of Plexiglas. To me, these paintings always suggested relentless, horizontal motion. But in Unsupervised, everything comes to you from the giant LED screen and aiming straight for your eyeballs.
Call it blunt force psychedelia: an unwilling trance state that, try as you might, you can’t shake off. There was a moment in my viewing when I peered behind me and glimpsed the tableau of visitors of every stripe—schoolkids on a field trip, men in cargo capri pants with cross-body bags, and mothers with all-terrain strollers—all rapt in slack-jawed wonder, all bathed in an undulating magenta light. It was mass hypnosis, a moment when museumgoers become suspended in a state of unwilling dysphoria. During this moment of thrall, I thought of a short story written in 1927 by the American horror and fantasy novelist H. P. Lovecraft called “The Colour Out of Space.” It is about a meteorite that crashes in a small New England town and of the strange events that follow. A strange color emanates from the meteorite, but it is a color that does not conform to the range of visible spectra. This unseen color causes strange things to happen, and the implication is that it is an alien presence.
What a strange name for a story. “Colour” seems almost too precious (the story does take place in early nineteenth century New England), and yet it reads like a creepy Farrow & Ball paint swatch. Whenever I encountered the title of this story, I read it as something completely different. I read it as if color were literally “out of space” or, rather, that it had run out of space. Somehow, the physical attributes that we used to understand and delineate space, things such as height, length, width, distance, depth, these were all gone. Space had become unrecognizable, incapable of being experienced. This, of course, is all wrong because the “colour” that is out of space is actually from space. It proves the importance of the preposition, sure. But it also captures something about Unsupervised that gave me a case of the howling fantods. The images were of such high resolution that they began to alter my depth perception. I was seasick, something I had not felt at MoMA at least since the 2015 Björk show.
Culture moves like quicksilver. It is evanescent, fugitive, hard to pin down. And this makes the critic’s task a difficult one: We think we are on the brink of some momentous insight only to find out that it has slipped through our fingers.
The thing that no one tells you about dropping acid is that everything feels totally normal, until it doesn’t. On that morning in 1989, for instance, while I was walking past the displays of weapons and armor and arriving at the monumental ultramarine stained glass of Marc Chagall’s America Windows, everything seemed normal. In the vast, resonant canyons of my brain, I could hear a tiny voice saying, “Your eyes are not deceiving you—that is indeed the Statue of Liberty lying demurely on her side (à la Édouard Manet’s Olympia), totally normal, move along.” And this was right before I got to the photography wing and stood before a photographic self-portrait of Edward Steichen. I stared intently at Steichen’s face, his intense eyes, his bow tie, his casual pose. “He looks like he’s about to go to a really nice wedding,” I thought, before I saw his lips move. “Get out while you can,” he seemed to say.
I got out.
The thing that no one tells you about Anadol’s Unsupervised is that it makes total sense, until it doesn’t. Take the central conceit underlying this piece of AI sculpture: that the algorithm is given free rein to dream and reimagine the collections at MoMA. Among all the queasy image-churnings there were several instances where, for a fleeting instant, I thought I could see the outlines of the four females from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, right before they morphed into some other nebulous thing. The wall text calls this whole process “reinterpretation”—a weird choice of words given that one of the goals of MoMA’s recent $450 million expansion was to reinterpret and reimagine its collections. This is normal. This is what museums do. What does not sit well is how this will be lost on audiences. And thanks to this installation, a new, lower bar has been established for what may pass as “interpretation” at a major cultural institution. Culture moves like quicksilver. It is evanescent, fugitive, hard to pin down. And this makes the critic’s task a difficult one because more often than not, we think that we are on the brink of some momentous insight only to find out that it has slipped through our fingers. This happens every time we enter a building or stand in front of artworks that we are supposed to review—our reviews are flimsy attempts to understand the world beyond the works we seek to critique, and we are left dawdling in their vapor trails. We sift through them, we scour our notes to make sense of our impressions, we gather our thoughts and commit them to the page, all with the hope that what we write will stick the landing, that a reader may come to appreciate what it means that a particular building or artwork exists in this moment of time. A critic’s engagement with a work of art will always be a record of a fleeting moment, and I suppose that our task is to convince the reader that we are riding a whirlwind, when in reality, we are witnessing a storm in a teacup.
To convince readers that Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised can mean something outside the current apoplexy concerning AI is a bit of a challenge. But is there any other way to look at it right now? Do Anadol’s visualizations offer any meaningful critique of AI beyond the wall text, a saccharine lede whose question “What would a machine dream of after seeing the collection of the Museum of Modern Art?” is so mind-numbingly dumb that my only response would be “It depends. Will it visit during a First Friday?” The obvious reference to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? also misses the mark. Of all the speculative fiction writers, Dick could very well imagine a machine that would see the collections at MoMA and perhaps even dream about them. But Dick was a smart enough writer to know that the worlds he dreamed were often marked by pain and loss. Unsupervised presents itself as sweetness and light, annoyingly so.
In those final moments that I stood before Anadol’s work, I felt unnerved by the irony of it all. I spend most of my life in front of screens, and the thought that my jaunt into the city to experience culture at a premium price would result in my spending time in front of the biggest, brightest screen still makes me laugh. And it did then too. For as I watched those sumptuous visuals, I thought of the videotape being played in perpetuity in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: stare at it long enough, and you too may laugh yourself to death.