In the basement of Manhattans most famous food hall – Chelsea Market – the creative space ARTECHOUSE opens with the first solo show in New York of a highly acclaimed digital artist: Refik Anadol.
After Washington DC and Miami, the ARTECHOUSE digital art space opens in New York, in the historic food court in Manhattan. “Using the hub of Chelsea Market in this neighborhood with a long-term focus on art – says the founder and art director of ARTECHOUSE Sandro Kereselidze – we wanted to bring a new type of artistic experience to the city. The works by Refik Anadol that break down boundaries of imagination are right in line with the ARTECHOUSE approach of expanding and experimenting with concepts of space.”
The new facility kicks off with an immersive “architectural hallucination” by the digital artist Refik Anadol, who with the exhibition Machine Hallucination interprets the styles and history of New York, perceived through millions of images. The images flow and dissolve as in a gigantic kaleidoscope that wraps the viewer in an unusual vision of the idea of three dimensions. “I am honored to have been chosen as the first artist to show in the new ARTECHOUSE space – says Refik Anadol – and I am particularly proud to be the first to reimagine this historic building more than one century old.
Using artificial intelligence to narrate the hybrid relationship between architecture and our perception of time and space, Machine Hallucination offers the audience a look at the future of architecture.” Art that plays with synesthetic experience, deploying machine learning algorithms on a dataset of over 3 million images of architectural styles and movements. Veritable multidimensional digital hallucinations created by the machine with the idea of exploring the way knowledge can be experienced through space.
The first solo exhibition on a large scale in New York by Anadol – of Turkish origin, based in Los Angeles – deconstructs the symbols of the city, which appear as liquid elements – from the Empire State Building to the Freedom Tower, from Hudson River to the traditional iron fire escapes, all the way to the works of avant-garde architecture that are radically transforming the skyline. Dematerialized architecture in which to recognize the city in instants, reassembling it through emotional experience.
