Refik Anadol’s New AI-generated Art Premiered in Las Vegas
World-renowned digital media artist Refik Anadol presents another large-scale AI-generated artwork on the world’s largest LED screen in Las Vegas.
The world of art and technology witnesses another spectacle as digital artist Refik Anadol turns the world’s largest LED screen into a masterpiece. Anadol's newest venture sees him paint with light on The Sphere in Las Vegas.
The Sphere is a colossal 366-foot-tall globe-shaped events venue, aiming to take immersive experiences to another level. Its exterior, also known as the “Exosphere,” spans over 580,000-square-feet and is crafted entirely from programmable LED screens, becoming a canvas with 360-degree display platform and inviting rotating artists to present their works. Kicking off this revolutionary Exosphere art program, Anadol's artificial intelligence data sculpture, “Machine Hallucinations: Sphere,” premiered on September 1st for a period of four months.
Anadol’s artworks have combined public data and machine learning algorithms to data sculptures and paintings, and in this case, it weaves large-scale animated abstractions inspired by outer space, nature, and urban landscapes. The piece is divided into two “chapters.” The first chapter delves into the realms of the universe, drawing approximately 1.1 million images from space institutions like NASA and the International Space Station. In contrast, the second chapter paints a picture of Earth, using 300 million images of global flora and fauna, intertwined with real-time wind and weather data from Las Vegas.
Anadol and his teams used similar AI research as before, yet the Sphere provides an unparalleled platform that demands them to reinvent the artistic approach, including thinking of new algorithms to work with the complex surface. Anadol's ambition is not confined to mere visuals, but to extend the work to “alternative realities” for the audience and to “challenge perceptions”.
Anadol born in Istanbul and now an LA resident, is no stranger to massive audiences. His works have been in renowned galleries around the world, projected onto the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and also included the backdrop of this year’s Grammys Awards stage. The “Machine Hallucinations – Nature Dreams” installation that he designed for the König Galerie in Berlin is another example of Anadol’s AI data sculptures. The dataset used to create this artwork was also used to train a generative adversarial network (GAN) AI algorithm, which is a prominent machine learning framework for approaching generative AI.