ADC Awards

ADC Annual Awards is the oldest continuously running industry award show in the world, with an incredible legacy of over 100 years. These awards celebrate the very best in advertising, digital media, graphic and publication design, packaging and product design, motion, experiential and spatial design, photography, illustration and fashion design – all with a focus on artistry and craftsmanship.

2020 ADC Awards - Spatial Design

Machine Hallucination

Agency Refik Anadol Studuio / Los Angeles

Client Artechouse
BACK TO RESULTS

Annual ID

ADC_SPL20_038M

About the Work

The question of why we collect, record, and share our quotidian experiences has always been entangled with the formal and aesthetic concerns about how to represent reality, totality, and the depth of human imagination. Nineteenth century poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé famously said that everything in the world existed to end up in a book. More recently, Jonathan Zittrain, the co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and society, suggested that “internet architecture” lacked a definable center and instead relied on “an extraordinary collective hallucination.” Refik Anadol Studio’s most recent synesthetic reality experiments deeply engage with such timeless questions and attempt at revealing new connections between visual narrative, archival instinct and collective consciousness. The project focuses on latent cinematic experiences derived from representations of urban memories as they are re-imagined by machine intelligence. For Artechouse’s New York location, Anadol presents a data universe of New York City in 1025 latent dimensions that he creates by deploying machine learning algorithms on over 300 million photographic memories of New York City. Machine Hallucination generates a novel form of synesthetic storytelling through