AI as an Artifical Brush: Refik Anadol
“Dvorak Dreams” by Refik Anadol at UNESCO-listed Rudolfinum, September 2023. Wikimedia Commons
AI and Painting
What is a painting? When you think about this question, I bet neither technology nor artificial intelligence come to your mind. Nowadays, we use technology everywhere, from our phones to our Siri’s and Alexa’s who are our personal assistants. However, when it comes to painting which is considered as an elegant and rather traditional branch of art because it is handmade, the thought of it being even slightly linked with technology would have surprised us only a couple of years ago. The Turkish-American artist Refik Anadol has been challenging our preconceptions of how a painting should be done. He collects visual data of human memory and combines it with AI to access and even create a new reality of human experience. Anadol’s main goal is to take a software capable of learning and accomplishing new tasks, and to teach it how to dream and hallucinate like human beings. Anadol and his technology create an artificial dream world. His software appears to be dreaming. His works also show human brain activities. Anadol can be considered as a digital surrealist since he mainly focuses on the unconscious mind and dreams in his works. We can say that Refik Anadol is the Salvador Dalí of our days.
Creating Dreams With an AI Paintbrush
Refik Anadol’s series “Unsupervised” displayed at New York’s MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) is one of his most famous works. It consists of three different works, “Machine Hallucinations,” “Fluid Dreams,” and “Generative Study 1.” When we are face to face with these AI paintings, one aspect that stands out is movement. The paintings are enormous, they look like colorful fluids floating on a screen.
Like the Surrealists, Anadol works with the concept of dreams, but in an abstract style. What we see on the screen is made out of thousands of visual images. Anadol is constantly researching and collecting different types of images, information, audio and sometimes even scent. With the combination of the collected data, he creates a machine that is able to dream and hallucinate. To add color into his works, the artist applies algorithms to paint to create the perfect balance of colors.
A New Perspective in 21st Century Painting
Surrealist art is for the individual rather than for the public eye, it is unique for each artist. The emotions and thoughts that are hidden in the unconscious mind are revealed with Surrealism. Whether painted with a physical or an artificial brush, the image becomes a mirror of the self. The 21st century is an era where technology is highly dominant. It is a tool that gives people the ability to reach and create everything they are looking for with the help of a click. With new technologies, the art world is gaining new perspectives. The one point that still remains unknown is the potential of AI to replace the hand in painting with a software that can paint on its own.
