Refik Anadol’s most recent synesthetic reality experiments on dreams and hallucinations reveal new connections between visual narrative, archival instinct, and collective consciousness. He focuses on latent cinematic experiences derived from representations of photographic memories as they are re-imagined by machine intelligence. Transforming a vast data set from the visual archives of International Space Station (ISS) into a dynamic data painting, this new iteration of Anadol explores artificial intelligence’s capacity to reach its own subconscious and offers an avant- garde form of cartographic aesthetics. ISS Dreams utilizes over 1.2 million images captured from the International Space Station, along with additional satellite imagery of Earth’s topology. Each version of ISS Dreams is derived from a different generative adversarial network (GAN) latent walk, interpolating between different landscapes and features of Earth. While the paintings’ intricate and abstracted layers of machine- generated dreams allude to a connection with a cosmos of unimaginable vast data, its natural pigments trigger a sense of belonging to the earth through an immersive experience. Artwork comes with a physical custom media server.
