Rather than act as a mirror, dutifully recreating or reporting back on the world around us, these artists often act as a portal to an entirely new universe. A universe where the artist has crafted unique entities from scratch through many compressed cycles of evolution. Where fascinating beings and impossible environments blend the foreign and the familiar, giving us a sense that there is life here, but perhaps not life as weve known it. This show focuses on the artistic process, highlighting how the proliferation of work afforded by digital tools often leads the artist to spend as much time curating as creating. However, it can be hard for the viewer to gather much context when looking at just one or two works by an artist. So as part of my prompt, I also asked the artists to leverage Edward Tuftes concept of small multiples, which display a set of images in close proximity together in order to facilitate comparisons across the full group of images at a glance.  Artnome - Jason Bailey

Feral File  Field Guide

Hypothetically Micro confronts us with a dozen bold ribbon-like entities placed against flat backgrounds of solid color. Familiar on the surface, they become increasingly difficult to place, particularly in terms of scale. Velitchkovas lyrical specimens are artfully cropped in a way that suggests we may be looking at the tail, wing, fin, or frond of a much larger organism. Yet something about the color palette also recalls the dyes used in microscopy: These forms could just as easily be microorganisms as much larger birdlike or fishlike creatures. Her work shines next to other generative artists for its elegant biomorphic forms and subtle exploration of color. Velitchkova is a magnificent biological architect, painstakingly crafting visual systems while bringing delicate new creatures to life.

Hypothetically Micro #37

Entity is a wonderful dance of life. Colorful microorganisms are born, engage in naturalistic individual and group behaviors, evolve, and then terminate, making room for new specimens to emerge. The balletic choreography is governed not by linear animation but through the artists deep exploration and understanding of force-repulsion fields. Indeed, work with this complexity and nuance would seem impossible to animate by hand and feels closer to systems and behaviors we are accustomed to seeing only in nature. Such is the unique brilliance of Jared S Tarbell that his work does not capture nature, it rivals it. 

This work is a programmed system and the video artifact was a capture of live interaction by the artist. The collectors will receive the interactive software as part of the acquisition. The music in this piece is Infinity Machine by Tonepoet.

Entity #37

Unsupervised is part of Machine Hallucinations, Refik Anadol Studios ongoing project exploring data aesthetics based on collective visual memories. The exhibition processes 138,151 pieces of metadata from the vast collection of The Museum of Modern Art in the mind of a machine. Using StyleGAN2 ADA to capture the machines transformative hallucinations of modern art in a multi-dimensional space, Anadol trains a unique AI model with subsets of the archive of MoMAs collection of artworks, creating embeddings in 1024 dimensions. The sorted image datasets are then clustered into thematic categories to better understand the semantic context of data. This expanding data universe not only represents the interpolation of data as synthesis, but also becomes a latent cosmos in which hallucinatory potential arises from a novel form of artistic creativity interpreting MoMAs unparalleled collection of modern and contemporary art. Refik Anadol

Feral File  Unsupervised

Unsupervised  Machine Hallucinations  MoMA Dreams is a series of algorithmic AI data paintings showcasing Refik Anadols unique collaboration with machine learning at the intersection of technology and aesthetics. Each image in the series displays a cluster of chosen dream sequences, as the artist goes through serendipitous allusions to modern visual expressions in the machine-mind. 

Collectors who acquire three artworks from the Dreams series as of December 1, 2021 will receive archival prints of their images shipped from the artists studio in early 2022. The prints will be 22" high and 12.4" wide.

Unsupervised  Machine Hallucinations  MoMA Dreams  C #18

For Your Eyes Only aims to stimulate a conversation with contemporary artists about the future of human visual culture, and to investigate how they are working, in different ways, on the development of a visual language capable to resist machine vision and its implications, and to improve human visual communicationa post-AI, posthuman human vision. The exhibition includes images of diverse nature and origin, submitted as answers to questions of how humans will continue to see and understand images differently than machines do. The images in this exhibition can be used like answers, but they are rather proofs. They have been sent by a human to another human, each of them carrying much more than what I asked for. They are not delivering an answer, they are the answer. Try to read them, and youll soon find out that they have as many readings as readers. Enjoy, theyre for your eyes only. Domenico Quaranta

Feral File  For Your Eyes Only

Patterns of Activation (gardens of the galaxy) is a GIF assemblage of images from various datasets the artist indexed on a citizen science platform, where volunteers are asked to index, draw on, and categorize images from various datasets, usually with the goal of training image processing AI algorithms. The images Novitskova worked on mostly include wildlife cam photos, astronomy, snail embryos, and monkey blood cells. If the overabundance of instrumental, machine-readable images may cheapen any meaning or aesthetic value, Novitskova actively digs some poetry out of these datasets. Such poetry comes from a combination of technology and the reality that it attempts to capture: glowing eyes of animals that reflect the flash-light of the camera, digital low resolution artifacts, accidentally stunning compositions of galaxies and forests, etc. The GIFs mechanical speed is faster than the usual human perceptionit is functional to the machine gaze, but in itself it creates a new type of poetic image, too.

Patterns of Activation (gardens of the galaxy) #111

Unsupervised  Machine Hallucinations  MoMA Dreams  H #18

Hypothetically Macro, is a mysterious cluster of glowing semitransparent organic primitives. The artist leverages the Processing programming language to deeply explore several variations of a single visual theme. Exploring the creation of new worlds through generative algorithms, Velitchkova presents us with images that could just as easily be on the other side of a microscope as they could a telescope. One might seem like a nucleus with quasi-biological elements embedded into a transparent cytoplasm at one minute, and the next a celestial body with an orbital structure and a background of infinite darkness. The grid reads almost like an animatic or a storyboard propelling us through a single ecosystem frame by frame.