Media artist Refik Anadol and director Sandro Kereselidze, founder of fabrication company Artechouse, teamed up to find a home for Anadol’s highly ambitious project Machine Hallucination: New York – which uses sophisticated algorithms to create a dream-like experience that explores how collective memory shapes a place.

Anadol and his studio harnessed an advanced type of AI that creates almost realistic outputs based on inputs, meaning that if you have enough data the AI can create images and sounds from that data. He approached Kereselidze who he had worked with on a similar project previously. “We immediately connected and spoke the same language about what art and technology should look like today for 21st century artists and audiences,” he says.

Anadol’s AI took 130 million images of New York and created a visualisation of machine learning, and a collective memory of New York housed, powered and projected by Artechouse’s systems. “You just step into this universe and suddenly you are surrounded by billions of particles reconstructing themselves, it feels a bit like science fiction but you are stepping inside it,” explains Anadol. “You are really stepping into a machine’s mind and the machine is really dreaming.”

This immersive artwork dreams of the city as you stand in a whirlwind of images, both found and created – a difficult and meticulous process which involved almost 65 terabytes of raw data. “It’s the beginning of something new and I hope 100 years from now when we look back this exhibit will go down as pioneering,” says Kereselidze.