In the middle of Las Vegas, colors and patterns swirl over the surface of a massive sphere . For a moment, it looks like an alien planet with a bizarre arrangement of ridges, forests, and oceans. But then the swirls change to pinks and blues, as if the planet is having a vivid dream.
This is Machine Hallucinations – Sphere, an installation by Turkish artist Refik Anadol that was on display in Las Vegas, Nevada from September through December 2023. It was the first artwork shown on the Sphere, a brand new entertainment arena. LED displays—the largest in the world—cover the outside and inside of this giant, round building. The band U2 performed a concert series there starting in September. Online influencer Jennifer Gay, also known as Vegas Starfish, attended. “The inside is nothing short of magical,” she said. The outside is magical as well, especially when artwork is on display.
Art installations are large-scale works typically made for a specific place and lasting for a limited time. Installations often invite people to move through or around an artwork. Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations – Sphere was a special, futuristic style of installation – it was also an example of new media art. This type of art makes use of LED screens, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, fiber optics, sensors, motion capture, or other types of new technology. It combines art with science, engineering, and performance. While traditional paintings and sculptures remain still and unchanging, new media art often invites visitors to interact, explore, and discover.
Anadol created his Sphere installation by feeding millions of images from space and from nature into AI models. The models turned the original images into what Anadol calls “data pigments. ” These pigments move based on weather information coming from sensors placed around Las Vegas. Anadol described his work as: “a science fiction moment that, finally, merges media arts and architecture, embedding technology into a physical environment that exists in the real world. ” The project explores AI-driven creativity. It’s a machine’s interpretation of the world via images people have collected. Visitors experience an alien perspective on the world, an unusual and hypnotizing look at how machine view our data.
A visit to a new media art installation is never a simple stroll through a gallery. It’s an experience of a different world or state of being. “You want it a little weird because that stops people in their tracks,” says artist Agniezska Pilat. She has created installation art pieces using robots.
At this type of installation, art comes alive.
Making Waves
Large, public LED displays—including Sphere—usually display advertisements. But when they show artwork, people take notice. In April 2020, people in Seoul, Republic of Korea were delighted to see that the large wraparound LED advertising screen in Coex K-POP Square had transformed into a large, realistic wave of water crashing and receding. This piece, WAVE, was created by the Seoul-based digital design company d’strict. The installation began during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company’s main goal was to provide a panicked city with a glimpse of peace and beauty. “Waves are something you might not be able to see unless you go to a beach. We thought people would love to see waves in Seoul,” said d’strict CEO Sean Lee.
The success of WAVE inspired d’strict to form an artist’s collective called a’strict that includes graphic designers, visual artists, programmers, and engineers. A few months later in August 2020, their first installation, Starry Beach, opened at Kukje Gallery in Seoul. The show’s description says it’s meant to “blur the lines between the physical and virtual worlds,” Visitors don’t just look at the artwork; they walk through it.
In Starry Beach, loud sounds of crashing waves surround visitors while mirrors play with the sense of space in a dark room. Meanwhile, projectors cast images of blue waves across the walls and floor, creating a wonderstruck and introspective experience.
Playing with Light
Many new media art installations use light to engage visitors. One artist, Bruce Munro, originally had a job in commercial lighting. Then, in 1992, he had a vision for a massive installation during a visit to Uluru (also called Ayer’s Rock) in Australia. This desert site contains one of the world’s largest rock formations, and it is culturally and spiritually important to local indigenous communities. “I felt so alive at Uluru,” Munro told Studio International. “Energy seemed to be coming out of the ground, or in the air; it was extraordinary, and I began to think about how I could make a piece of art to express what I was experiencing. ” He was also inspired by the life cycles of deserts. Many deserts are empty and colorless most of the time. But after it rains, they will burst into life with many colorful blooms.
Munro went into debt and spent 24 years working on Field of Light. Versions of this art installation have opened in the UK, the United States, Denmark, and Republic of Korea. But the largest and most awe-inspiring is the one at Uluru, which opened in 2016. It contains 52,000 glowing glass spheres, covering a swath of desert the size of over seven football fields. The spheres extend from the desert on narrow rods as if they are flowers growing. Fiber optic cables inside the rods carry light from programmable LED projectors. One projector can light up several hundred of the spheres. Solar energy powers the entire installation.
Visiting Field of Light is an intense experience. Some cry from the overwhelming emotion of experiencing this work. Others react with joy, wonder, or curiosity.
Jen Lewin’s The Last Ocean also mesmerizes visitors with light. It first opened in 2022 at Burning Man, an annual arts festival in the Black Rock Desert of northwestern Nevada. Lewin, who is both an artist and an engineer, embedded a network of LED lights inside plastic platforms. These change color as people step on them. All of the plastic in the platforms was recycled or rescued from the ocean by the company Ocean Plastic Technologies, based in South Africa. Lewin says that most of this plastic was originally blue bottle caps, clear water bottles, and solid white containers such as milk jugs.
She loves to see how visitors interact with the installation. She told My Modern Met: “My team and I have watched as participants dance on the work, picnic on the work, sit and watch the work, do yoga on the work, play tag on the work, do handstands on the work, take naps on the work, kiss loved ones on the work. ” But she hopes that visitors also take away a message about climate change and sustainability. Plastic waste is an appalling problem. Art installations like this one, Lewin says, “activate engagement, awareness, and open communication that I hope can lead to solution finding and a better future. ”
Inviting Interaction
Many new media art pieces use technology to respond to visitors. In these artworks, sensors may detect people’s motion, faces, sounds, or even heartbeats. This information then feeds into the artwork in some way. It may use AI to interpret the data and generate images or sounds.
This type of art “is changed simply by the mere existence of another person,” teamLab said in a 2020 interview. TeamLab is an international art collective that formed in 2001 in Tokyo, Japan . The group bring together artists, programmers, engineers, animators, mathematicians, and architects to create interactive art using digital technology. “With the type of art that we have experienced up until now,” teamLab said, “the presence of other viewers constituted more of a hindrance than anything else. If you found yourself alone at an exhibition, you would consider yourself to be very lucky. ” At teamLab’s exhibitions, though, having other people around only adds more mystery and delight to the experience.
In 2020, the group opened a new permanent exhibit in Fukuoka, Japan called teamLab Forest. Visitors explore a series of rooms, using their bodies to interact and play with the artwork. The walls of one room display a virtual forest filled with brightly colored animals and plants. People use their smart phones to collect these specimens, study them, and then release them. In another room, colorful spheres embedded in the floor and walls rotate rapidly, but slow down when people get close so they can step onto them. The floor of another space is soft and covered in patterns that change as walking feet alter its shape. To visitors, the experience is playful and engaging. It’s art disguised as a fun game.
This type of art “is changed simply by the mere existence of another person,” teamLab said in a 2020 interview. TeamLab is an international art collective that formed in 2001 in Tokyo, Japan . The group bring together artists, programmers, engineers, animators, mathematicians, and architects to create interactive art using digital technology. “With the type of art that we have experienced up until now,” teamLab said, “the presence of other viewers constituted more of a hindrance than anything else. If you found yourself alone at an exhibition, you would consider yourself to be very lucky. ” At teamLab’s exhibitions, though, having other people around only adds more mystery and delight to the experience.
In 2020, the group opened a new permanent exhibit in Fukuoka, Japan called teamLab Forest. Visitors explore a series of rooms, using their bodies to interact and play with the artwork. The walls of one room display a virtual forest filled with brightly colored animals and plants. People use their smart phones to collect these specimens, study them, and then release them. In another room, colorful spheres embedded in the floor and walls rotate rapidly, but slow down when people get close so they can step onto them. The floor of another space is soft and covered in patterns that change as walking feet alter its shape. To visitors, the experience is playful and engaging. It’s art disguised as a fun game.
The goal of this work was to reveal that learning isn’t just a mental activity. People also learn through social interaction and physical movement. “People think with their bodies as they move through the world, and society has developed through creative activities born from collaboration. This is why co-creative experience is very important for society,” teamLab said.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s 2021 installation at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, Pulse Topology, is a room filled with 3,000 lightbulbs that hang down from the ceiling. If a visitor chooses, they may hold a palm under a sensor that detects their pulse. “It’s basically the computer observing tiny variations in the coloration of your skin and being able to detect the repetitive pattern of the pulse,” Lozano-Hemmer explained. Next, a thousand of the lightbulbs in the space begin to brighten and dim in synch with the heartbeat. A vibrating sound will also play with the same rhythm. When another person adds their pulse, the first person’s pulse remains on one lightbulb, so the room keeps a record of several thousand previous visitors.
This exhibit took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, so many people had experienced long periods of being alone or apart from others. His work responded to this. “To be immersed with others in a space that is itself made out of the presence of others is significant,” Lozano-Hemmer said. Many people who visited the exhibition felt a sense of connection. Reviewer Ava Morollo wrote, “I saw parents help their children place their fingers on the sensor and watched their small faces light up with wonder… although children could not understand Pulse Topology on a deep level, they understood the basic principle that they had the power to become a part of the exhibit and see themselves within the larger message. ”
Virtual Reality
As engineers develop new technology, artists will employ it in new ways in their works and installations. It’s impossible to imagine now what the installation art of the future might look like. But Josh Vermillion has provided a glimpse of some of the possibilities. He is an architect who uses generative AI to create images of virtual spaces, often with people moving through. His art explores the weirdness of AI and its ability to inspire human creativity. Most of the images look like photos of large scale art installations or artsy buildings, but none of them exist in reality. In the summer of 2023, his work was displayed at the NOW arcade in the Outernet gallery in London. This is a hallway with huge screens that span the walls from floor to ceiling.
He has no plans to try to build any of these pieces in reality. But someday, people may be able to visit his works in virtual reality. “That’s the idea,” he says. “I have been looking at technologies that go from 2D and map images three – dimensionally. ” For example, an AI model might begin with a flat front view of a scene and then map out what the side, back, and top views of the same thing should look like. The technology to do this successfully is still being developed and often requires advanced computing hardware. But the field is moving quickly, with new, improved tools rapidly becoming available.
Artists have already created works for people to experience in VR . But due to limitations with todays’ technology, existing VR art tends to be fairly low-resolution and abstract.
Someday, Vermillion imagines, he might work with AI models to generate incredible architectural spaces that people can then experience in virtual reality, almost like moving through a dream.
Robot Art
Meanwhile, artist Agniezska Pilat wonders whether humans might be the only creators of art in the future. Perhaps AI and robots will make their own art. Pilat’s 2023 installation Heterobota at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia explored this idea. The piece includes three Boston Dynamics Spot robots, named Basia, Omuzana, and Bunny. They explore the space, sometimes looking out at the audience.
Pilat says it’s sort of like a zoo. One robot also grips sticks of oil paint and draws lines and dots on large canvases on the wall. Pilat programmed instructions for the robots to follow, but there is an element of randomness in how they execute their orders. She feels like a teacher, as if she and the robots are “collaborators” in creating this artwork. “Hopefully they will out-master me one day,” she says.
Visitors may also find their usual ideas about robots challenged. They may leave with a sense that robots have the potential to be more than servants. Maybe they could someday become pets, co-workers, or even artists.
Vermillion and many other artists and non-artists are already using generative AI tools such as MidJourney and Stable Diffusion to create images. But these images are produced using statistics to mimic art that people already created. As Pilat sees it, “it’s a losing proposition to try to mimic human art. It’s very uninteresting. ”
However, she thinks as robots improve, they will be able to become artists. When she first met the Spot robot, she says, “there was an impression of meeting another species that has its own agency, its own mind.” She imagines that if her art survives for thousands of years, and if AI continues to develop, then the robots of the future might see the Spot robots’ crude drawings the same way people see ancient cave drawings. “I think the robots will find their own language,” she says.
New media art installations reveal new ways that art can exist. It can meld virtual and real spaces, nature and technology, or science and imagination. Every new technology that emerges becomes another tool that creative people (and perhaps also robots!) can use to craft incredible and eye-opening experiences.
