Machine Hallucinations: Mars Landscapes by Refik Anadol

Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is a media artist, director and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. His body of work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. In taking the data that flows around us as the primary material and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol paints with a thinking brush, offering us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expanding the possibilities of architecture, narrative, and the body in motion.

Anadol’s site-specific AI data sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, its temporal and spatial dimensions, and the creative potential of machines. Machine Hallucinations – Mars Landscapes offer a new kind of cognitive cartography for data universes by using a neural network trained on 1.5 million archival photographic memories of HiRISE telescope of MRO Mars. A poetic journey in the mind of a machine explores vast synthetic landscapes of Mars to image a space yet reachable by humans.

Providing imaginary texture to this still unfamiliar place, Machine Hallucinations – Mars Landscapes illustrates a dreamscape of possible futures and hidden pasts. These machine-hallucinated AI Data Paintings come to represent collective memory, hidden layers of history, and then consciousness of a planet that, otherwise, might remain unseen.

HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) is the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet, one of six instruments onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It was launched in 2005, arrived at Mars in 2006, and have been imaging ever since. MRO's camera’s high resolution capability (imaging up to 30 centimeters per pixel) remains unprecedented for any existing orbiter in the study of the Red Planet, as well as being an indispensable instrument for helping to select landing sites for robotic and future human exploration.

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