Modern Dream: How Refik Anadol Is Using Machine Learning and NFTs to Interpret MoMA’s Collection

MOMA

This week, on the new-media platform Feral File, artist Refik Anadol presents Unsupervised, an exhibition of works created by training an artificial intelligence model with the public metadata of The Museum of Modern Art’s collection. Spanning more than 200 years of art, from paintings to photography to cars to video games, the Museum’s collection represents a unique data set for an artist who has worked with many different public archives. The AI-based abstract images and shapes in Unsupervised are interpretations of the Museum’s wide-ranging collection, weighted toward the exhibition of new artworks at MoMA this fall.

Starting with the exhibition opening on November 18, new artworks will be revealed and released over three days. Each work will be made available to collectors as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs.

MoMA curators Paola Antonelli and Michelle Kuo sat down with Anadol and Casey Reas, the artist-founder of Feral File, to talk about the ecology of mobile images, art in the age of mechanical learning, and the question: What if a machine tried to create “modern art”?

Continued…