A machine dreamt of Mumbai, and an artist brought its vision to life. Refik Anadol’s Mumbai Dreams, a stunning series of digital art installations created for the facade of the Jio World Centre, invites viewers into a story about the city, as told by AI. The series represents what Anadol refers to as a “machine hallucination”, generated as part of the Istanbul-born, Los Angeles-based multimedia artist’s explorations in the field of data aesthetics.  

 Anadol has been fascinated by programming ever since he was a young boy playing games on a Commodore PC, dabbling in whatever 8-bit programming he could manage at the time. He went on to study digital art at Istanbul Bilgi University. Subsequently, he got his MFA in Design Media Arts at UCLA, and under the mentorship of American artist and processing programming language co-creator Casey Reas, started experimenting with data painting, data sculpture, and other data-based installations. Anadol’s journey with AI began in 2016 when he was invited to be the first-ever artist-in-residence of Google’s Artist and Machine Intelligence Programme. His project, “Archive Dreaming”, used machine learning algorithms to sort through and eventually artistically interpret over 17,00,000 documents in the SALT Research Center archives in Istanbul.  

Since then, he has worked with billions of data sets and hundreds of different AI models, notably DCGAN, PGAN and StyleGAN. Anadol’s work has been featured at the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in France, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, to name a few. Anadol’s hope is that his work will invite audiences to engage with machine intelligence on even ground, and they will become discerning citizens of a more equitable, AI-augmented future. He is currently a teacher at UCLA’s Design Media Arts programme and is also working with Professor P Murali Doraiswamy of the Duke University School of Medicine to find ways of using art to help patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Here he reflects on his journey and his hopes for an AI-augmented future. Edited excerpts:  

 What is data aesthetics?  

Data is a form of memory. I don’t think we should only think about a number—you can think of data as light, as a pigment or as a material. This is what inspired me, in 2008, when I coined the term “data painting”, and it’s been a long journey since. Wi-Fi signals, Bluetooth signals, our heartbeat and brain signals—every single moment of our lives, we are interacting with data. Transforming that channel of data streams into art became my obsession over the last 14 years. I see AI as a creator and partner, and my question was, if a machine can learn, then can it dream? Can it hallucinate? The reason I am looking at the fantasies of a machine is because I’m not interested in mimicking reality—I am trying to see if we can go somewhere that we’ve never been before.  

 What are some of the ways in which AI has opened up new realms of knowledge or imagination?  

I am really inspired by consciousness: how we take information and turn it into knowledge and then eventually wisdom. Data is a form of memory, and I think AI can assist us in understanding our information about humanity. The reason I use the term “hallucination” is because I was so inspired by a neuroscientist, professor Anil Seth, who said that consciousness is a controlled hallucination. It’s an incredible statement and an incredibly inspiring way of looking at what consciousness means. I am not trying to use AI models as they are, I am trying to find this new imagination extension for the mind that doesn’t necessarily mimic reality. We know that AI can create realistic human voices and realistic texts—essentially, it can create almost realistic things. When you start to work with AI in the opposite direction, that’s the ultimate challenge.  

How did the machine interpret data about Mumbai?  

We don’t like to have any bias in the beginning, so we looked at Mumbai as a whole, but then while creating these machine hallucinations, we looked for the colours, the forms, and the patterns. One of the most common patterns that I saw in the data set was those iconic buildings—the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the Bombay High Court and the BMC building, for instance—were very heavy data sets that created very beautiful details and had the largest impact on the AI’s hallucinations. I think it is also maybe that people love to share and hashtag those iconic buildings, so they were very common in our data sets, but it could also be my own bias, because I love architecture so much. I was super inspired by BV Doshi, Laurie Baker, Brinda Somaya and Chitra Vishwanath while researching the architecture. When I was looking at the painting journey, the most powerful artist on my mind was FN Souza, and then of course MF Husain, VS Gaitonde. They’re very culturally connected, inspiring artists.  

 What are the conversations you’d like to have about architecture, imagination, and the idea of the “collective” as witnessed through this project? 

I do believe that art can only be successful if it touches someone’s mind and soul. When I was talking with my Indian friends who have lived in Mumbai, when they watched the paintings, they felt such a strong connection to them, and I was really inspired by that. I think there is a spiritual connection in the information, which has been completely transformed into pixels, in the AI’s dreams. I hope when people see the work, they will just stop and enjoy the moment. Sometimes life is very fast, with a lot of heaviness and so much responsibility. “Mumbai Dreams” could be a form of meditation, an invitation for people to stop and remember the beauty around them, the beauty of being alive. I think that’s where these artworks can create an impact.  

 What are your thoughts on the place machine intelligence could have in our lives in the near future?  

I think we have to think about the future together. I don’t believe the future has to be built by only people who can invent the technology, because that’s a very shallow perspective. When everything becomes a product and service, I think that world will be a very boring world. We have to find a way to bring imagination, values, and culture into the discourse. I don’t want to be a wishful thinker; I want to be realistic here. Things may go wrong with AI, because AI is a mirror for humanity, and this mirror can reflect whoever we are, whatever our intentions are. I am pretty confident that AI models are collective memories. Our memories are becoming machine learning algorithms and AI models, so this very predictably can go wrong, but in the meantime, the same tools can create a much more positive impact. We should not discredit something so powerful and meaningful and purposeful for humanity, just because we don’t trust ourselves. If we know who we are, and there is good intent, AI will reflect that. It is in our hands to make the dreams happen or not.  

 Refik Anadol’s Mumbai Dreams is on display at the Jio World Centre in Mumbai until the end of July