Refik Anadol to Stage Monumental AI Installation on Smithsonian Castle in DC
Media artist Refik Anadol will present “Smithsonian Dreams,” a large-scale A.I.-driven projection on the facade of the Smithsonian Castle in Washington, DC, on July 17 and July 18 at 9 p.m. The Smithsonian Institution project uses a custom A.I. system to reinterpret 200 years of Smithsonian collections and research—described as millions of digitized specimens, manuscripts, photographs, artworks, objects, and scientific records—visualized through a custom system using a UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) algorithm. The work follows Anadol’s recent launch of Dataland, an A.I. art museum in Los Angeles, and echoes his MoMA installation “Unsupervised,” which similarly processed a museum collection via UMAP and was framed as a machine’s “dreams.” Anadol’s studio said about three million people visited MoMA to see “Unsupervised,” with viewers spending an average of about 38 minutes in front of it.
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This story was covered in AI Unearths Secrets, Museums Face Reckoning