Refik Anadol, Latent Being, 2019. LAS Light Art Space at Kraftwerk Berlin © Camille Blake. Courtesy of LAS.
While everyone has their own way of experiencing the German capital, AI artist Refik Anadol is creating a type of collective unconscious of the city. His installation Latent Being presented by Light Art Space (LAS) in the cavernous ex-power plant, Kraftwerk, has algorithms creating a data-driven, immersive fantasy of Berlin and tracking visitors to shape the work.
“Machines are allowing us to think beyond our linear life and have a new type of imagination,” Refik said at the preview of the installation. “What kind of cultural narratives can we create if machines tell us what experiences are shared.”The show opens with projections of the 10,000 photographs of Berlin that run along the floor as if on the band of a treadmill, a mix of archival and contemporary shots, which Anadol’s team found on online. The soundtrack, composed by Kerim Karaoglu, takes an AI processed field recording of Berlin—everything from booming techno at Berghain to street sounds and radio chatter and combines them with older sound pieces, found on the internet. Although it is only light creating the backwards motion, walking through the pictures tricks your body into thinking it is walking against a physical current.
For the second act, the projections black out and geometric architecture is created with colourful lasers, an abstract representation of the layers of the neural network (VGG16), which creates the artwork later in the show. One of the reasons Anadol likes to create architectural work with light, instead of building materials, is that people can interact with it without altering it. “Light is the only material where humans can interact with a space without making any problems or causing things to collapse,” he says.
Refik Anadol, Latent Being, 2019. LAS Light Art Space at Kraftwerk Berlin © Camille Blake. Courtesy of LAS.
Upon entering the space, visitors are given a tracking device. The effects of the tracker are largely unnoticed until projected squares with coordinates appear on the concrete floor that follows people as they move. But location data is not all that is being collected by the algorithm. Along with movement patterns, the machine takes note of how long visitors spend in the installation, which affects the images and pace of the show. “We are, at the end of the day, the ones feeding and steering the machine,” Anadol says. “With our physical movements within the installation, as well as with our day-to-day actions within the digital sphere.”
The piece culminates in the reveal of how the GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks) algorithm imagines Berlin—images of the city that melt from green-roofed neoclassical cathedrals to brutalist concrete structures. Although everything seems familiar, none of it is 100 percent real. Faces also appear on the screen that shift and rebuild, seamlessly changing gender, ethnicity and expression.
“The appearing faces are never actual photos from individuals, but accumulations, morphed versions of many pictures that the AI classified as ‘similar’,” the artist says. “The neural network has been trained using a huge number of faces to hallucinate the most realistic ‘fakes’ of faces seen in Berlin.”
While dreams and hallucinations are often associated with Freudian psychoanalysis, Anadol is more inspired by the cognitive school of psychology, nurturing a curiosity about the encoding process that allows memories to be stored in the mind. Without memories to reference, there can be no dreams.
“Instead of trying to make humans more machine-like, I find it more interesting to make machines more human,” he says.
Latent Being is running at Kraftwerk Berlin until 5 January 2020.