Any New Yorker who commutes by train already spends plenty of time underground, but with the introduction of the city’s first subterranean gallery, they could be logging even more hours below deck.
In early September, experiential art purveyor ARTECHOUSE launched its third location—after Washington, DC, in 2017 and Miami Beach the year after that—in the boiler room at Chelsea Market, below the main level and its vendors, shops, and unabating crowds of tourists. It’s supposedly the most technologically-advanced art space in the world, boasting 16K resolution, 150 megapixel laser-projection tech and L’ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound technology with 32 separate channels, and the inaugural exhibit takes full advantage of the tech-savvy space.
For the gallery's debut exhibition (on view through 1 December), “Machine Hallucination,” Los Angeles-based digital artist, Refik Anadol, examined architectural images from around the city, using them as the basis of and the jumping-off point for what would become his first large-scale solo installation in New York. "“The city itself, captured in millions of photographic memories by the people who encounter it, serves as the perfect muse for this type of exploration – how the mind of a machine visualizes aspects of this iconic city that would otherwise go unseen," he said in a statement.
“With over 100 million public photographs of New York—the largest mass of raw data gathered for an artwork to date—Anadol created an algorithm trained to target archival images and Instagram posts without human subjects in protection of their privacy,” Rachel Gould writes for Architectural Digest. “The machine subsequently processed a subset of eight million pictures across a mind-bending 1000 dimensions, and what Anadol refers to as ‘enormous, unimaginable worlds’ thereafter.”
He told AD that for his concept, he referenced generative adversarial networks (GANs), which “train each other, and their dialogue can be captured to create a story. So let’s say it’s the near future. A machine has taken over a space, and dreams about the city it’s inside. In this case, that city is New York. What would that machine’s dream look like?”
The Turkey-born artist has set a high bar for future exhibitions, but the organization doesn’t seem have any worries about measuring up in the future. "The mission of ARTECHOUSE has always been to give a platform to creators whose work pushes the boundaries of what is possible in the realm of technology and the arts,” co-founder and art director Sandro Kereselidze said in a statement. “We are thrilled to debut Refik Anadol’s visionary, groundbreaking new installation, which will engage New York audiences with an entirely new, never-before-seen kind of art experience of their beloved city.”
