I met an old friend at MoMA yesterday, and passed by again the gargantuan digital work of Refik Anadol, "Unsupervised" in the ground floor lobby. Originally scheduled just for a few months last year, it's been extended and extended. As a work of machine-learning AI - it generates a constantly new stream of images from the database of MoMA's digitized collection - it's more timely than ever. It has three modes - lines, liquids, spray - in some of which it's a little easier to catch a flash of a familiar work, in palette or structure, but it's always on the move, never the same, like a fountain, a volcano, a kaleidoscope, a tumble drier.
The concept?
What would a machine dream about after seeing the collection of The Museum of Modern Art? ... As the model “walks” through its conception of this vast range of works, it reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been—and what might be to come. In turn, Anadol incorporates site-specific input from the environment of the Museum’s Gund Lobby—changes in light, movement, acoustics, and the weather outside—to affect the continuously shifting imagery and sound.When I saw it first, at the end of November last year, I found it fascinating and disconcerting. In my diary I wrote: You can’t look away from it’s eyepopping colors and apparent three-dimensionality but are dazzled then exhausted by its relentless movement, with a music of the spheresy soundtrack grabbing and holding you too, the eye frantically looking for meaning or significance or beauty, not sure where to look, everything moving too fast, you’ve missed it, forever.
Since then I've seen it in passing a few times, in February with a visiting cousin, who shot the video above, a little less wowed each time. Seeing it again today, I found it quickly oppressive. What's changed? In November I could still see it as art. In fact that's why my eyes went crazy, seeking to take it in and understand it the way one does a work of art, seeking intention and seeking meaning behind every spot of color, every detail of layout (even if, this being MoMA after all, the meaning was deliberately obscure). That's also why I felt a deep sadness at having missed something.
After eight months of AI lapping at every shore, I just saw the churning guts of an algorithm, spinning out meaningless juxtaposition after meaningless juxtaposition of human-made content chewed beyond recognition. It was interesting enough to look at but nothing was a candidate for significance unless we were sucker enough to think there was one, and I wasn't prepared to play. All "hallucinations." Yes, this makes "Unsupervised" kin to works in the collection, abstract or aleatory, using random or found materials, viewer input or newest technologies, but the joke doesn't seem funny anymore. Why would MoMA give all this work of human genius away?
