Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams

Role: Producer, Writer, Concept Development ≈ Client: Refik Anadol

As a creative researcher at the Refik Anadol Studio, led by director Refik Anadol, I led concept development and helped produce this audio/visual installation showcased first at IEEE VISAP 2019.

The question of why we collect, record, and share our quotidian experiences has always been entangled with formal and aesthetic concerns about how to represent reality, totality, and the depth of human imagination. Nineteenth century poet and critic Stephane Mallard famously said that everything in the world existed to end up in a book. Revisiting Mallarme’s proposition in her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography, Susan Sontag wrote, “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” More recently, Jonathan Zittrain, the co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, suggested that “internet architecture” lacked a definable center and instead relied on “the extraordinary collective hallucination.”

Machine Hallucinations: Earth is a synthetic reality experiment that deeply engages with such timeless questions and attempts to reveal new connections between visual narrative, archival instinct and collective consciousness. Using machine learning to deconstruct and investigate memories of a machine’s capture of planet Earth from space this project aims to illuminate the representation of boundaries space both in terms of cultural  implications as well as providing a visualization of the interconnectedness of the planet’s varied landscapes. 

Also shown at IEEE VISAP 2019 program.