Anadolu said all artists want to see “beyond reality” and “perceive worlds that don't exist.” AI is a means of using the imagination, he said, allowing for “hallucinations, dreams and fantasies.”
The technology we work with today is no longer “just pens and printing presses” or “just cars and wheels.” Rather, “it's an intelligence,” he said. “It's imitating our reasoning at the moment, and it evolves. It turns into something else,” and that “has never happened before in our history.”
He explained that currently, AI is “50% human and 50% machine.” In the future, he said, AI will be able to “see, hear, feel, be designed from the ground up” and create “living art” that will be “synthetic beings.” He said artificial intelligence will be able to take “the archives of humanity and what we have left behind” — images, text, audio, but also “smell, taste, touch” — and convert that into data and memory to create art.
He described the AI ​​as “a thinking brush that never forgets and can remember anything,” and said he would “invite the AI ​​into my studio to host and create with me. I would accept the AI ​​as a person,” he said.
Anadolu's “Echoes of the Earth” exhibition was organised following an invitation from the Serpentine Gallery's artistic director, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, to exhibit at the gallery.
In an interview at his Serpentine offices, Obrist recalled that after he gave a talk in Marrakech, Morocco, in October 2011, an artist and technologist from London approached him and said he didn't understand why museums weren't working with technology beyond their websites. Obrist brought the artist and a group of others together for a breakfast roundtable a few days later, and they founded the Serpentine Technology department in 2013. The department now has five curators.