Synthetic Media

 The Synthetic media I found is Machine Hallucination by Refik Anadol. The work has been on view at Artechouse, a new digital art space in New York's Chelsea Market. 

It is a typical synthetic art because the work significantly relies on algorithms, computers, and AI. The reason it is called Machine Hallucination is very much started with the idea of the "mind of a machine" as the Artist said, "if a machine can learning, so can it dreaming?" 

Several big screens make the installation in the space to let audiences feel into the artwork. The art piece is very much about data, different algorithms, and machine learning. It starts with 300 million publicly available images of New York City that Anadol and his studio used the neural network and various modifications to find. And also, they took off all the human figures in those data they found. After processing this massive audio and visual data, the StyleGAN algorithm was then programmed to "dream"—basically, to spit back visual associations it learned as it reviewed images. I don't know how the algorithm exactly works, but according to my research, it is trendy in google, too; here is the related link.

https://www.popsci.com/these-are-what-google-artificial-intelligences-dreams-look/

Basically, the algorithm gives a very surreal and dreamlike result. At the beginning of the artwork, there are few minutes with very New York City imagery moment, but then it went very abstract. The final image looks like the movement of colorful water and is more abstract. You can't even tell it is generated from photos of New York City.

I don't think there are any ethical ramifications of this artwork. As I mentioned before, the Artist and his team even consider people's privacy, so they choose only to use publicly available images. Also, the Artist emphasized that data is only the media he decided; data is their pigment, but their thinking is the paintbrush. So even though the Artist does think the machine will replace and change many things in our lives, he more thinks it is a helpful tool to help people achieve something more significant.