For this AI data painting, Anadol was inspired by the famous astrophysicist Carl Sagan. In 1980, in an episode of his TV show Cosmos, Sagan said, “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.” Forty-one years after Sagan’s statement, Anadol presents a “machine hallucination” that connects photographic astronomic data with AI technology and new media art, imagining a visualized data universe as a first step to reach the Earth’s unseen dimensions. This universe exhibits multiple flow of networks between data points made up of Earth’s and other celestial objects’ topologies, giving us a glimpse into the latent landscapes of our planet hallucinated by the mind of a machine.

The creation process for Machine Hallucinations – Space | Chapter I: Earth (Generative AI Data Painting) can be found here:

Machine Hallucinations – Space | Chapter I: Earth (Generative AI Data Painting) invites the audience to reflect on the relationship between technology, AI, and space explorations by viewing how the machine intelligence hallucinates after “seeing” millions of space images taken by the ISS telescope.

Machine Hallucinations: Space is an-going AI research of data aesthetics at the RAS Lab based on collective visual memories of space. Since 2016, Anadol and his team have been using custom algorithms to train machine intelligence in processing these vast datasets and unfolding unrecognized layers of our external realities. Below is a selection of works from the Machine Hallucinations series created from 2016 to 2021.