C2award
Best of Best 2022 / Exhibition design / Temporary exhibitions

Machine Hallucinations: Coral

  • Prize
    Best of Best in Temporary exhibitions / Exhibition design
  • Company
    Refik Anadol Studio
  • Lead
    Refik Anadol
  • Team
    Alex Morozov, Carrie He, Christian Burke, Daniel Seungmin Lee, Efsun Erkilic, Kerim Karaoglu, Pelin Kivrak, Ho Man Leung, Nidhi Parsana, Raman K. Mustafa, Rishabh Chakrabarty, Toby Heinemann, Yufan Xie
  • Client
    Miami Art Week

Machine Hallucinations: Coral emerges from RAS’s ongoing research on data aesthetics and collective visual memories of nature. For this data sculpture, Anadol and his team collected 1,742,772 images of coral from publicly available platforms and processed them with machine learning algorithms. Bridging the physical and digital world, the artwork was also transformed into an NFT collection to bring attention to the impact of climate change on coral die-offs. Proceeds from the sale of the NFTs were donated to The ReefLine, an artificial reef, marine habitat and sculpture park in Miami Beach.

Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is a media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of machine intelligence. His body of work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. In taking the data that flows around us as his primary material and the neural network of a computerized mind as his collaborator, Anadol paints with a thinking brush, offering us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expanding the possibilities of architecture, narrative, and the body in motion.