This is a staggering, stunning exhibition, for once the hackneyed phrase ‘immersive installation’ really is justified. The relatively small space of the Serpentine North Gallery has been taken over by the studio of Refik Anadol and the result is quite mind-blowing, stunning, stupefying. This is a must-see experience.
Installation view of ‘Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, 2024’ by Refik Anadol at Serpentine North. Photo by Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy Refik Anadol Studio and Serpentine
Born in 1985, Refik Anadol is Turkish. He is a pioneer in the aesthetics of machine intelligence, so a technologist as well as an artist. He and the many employees in his software, art and design company, Refik Anadol Studios, have developed an artificial intelligence program into which they’ve fed scores of millions of images of the natural world, and the program produces animated, continually changing visions of the natural world which they’ve projected along the walls and ceiling of the gallery. It’s accompanied by a dreamy, trippy soundtrack of ambient music, birdsong etc to create a genuinely overwhelming immersive experience.
Every direction you look in, there’s flowers changing into coral changing into rainforest changing into parrots changing into strange landscapes, weird organic shapes, constantly flowing and evolving and mutating along the entire length of the gallery walls, overwhelming the senses.
At some moments it’s flowers, then corals, for long stretches it’s a sequence of mutating bobbled surfaces, like the skin of lizards or bobbly semolina thrusting out and multiplying, like boiling porridge, like microscope footage of the gut wall, splitting and expanding and softly exploding to create a phantasmagoria of shapes, sometimes doubling and quartering symmetrically as in a kaleidoscope, never staying the same.
Installation view of ‘Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, 2024’ by Refik Anadol at Serpentine North. Photo by the author
For one passage, the static shots of idealised coral and the semolina mutations give way to a clean vision of a dream landscape, a spectral forest of the type found on the covers of science fantasy books or in sci fi games, a world of mysterious walkways through a landscape of vast trees and illuminated mushrooms, like something out of the Avatar movies.
Installation view of ‘Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, 2024’ by Refik Anadol at Serpentine North. Photo by the author
And then, suddenly, abruptly, all the images disappear, the walls go black for a moment and then code appears, the binary code which drives all digital devices and content, we see black space, then flickers of code, like a program being rebooted. Then there’s a vast array of tiny digital images, the images of the natural world from which the whole thing has been concocted, streaming down the walls like a digital waterfall, in a style we’re accustomed to from loads of Hollywood movies about AI and digital information. We are being shown the guts of the program, behind the scenes.
Installation view of ‘Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, 2024’ by Refik Anadol at Serpentine North. Photo by the author
Running between the four outside corridors of Serpentine North are two smaller spaces known as the gunpowder rooms. One of these has its entire ceiling dedicated to a projection of one of these ever-changing displays. While I watched it, focused on a rainforest environment, showing branches and lianas morphing into each other, sat on by birds which started as parrots and morphed into cockatoos, themselves changing into a sloth then a bear – a mesmerising, everchanging fantasia, vividly Pixar Studio-bright, over-coloured images of the natural world.
The great feature of the main gunpowder room is the beanbags! Fifteen or so beanbags are strewn around the floor and visitors are actively encouraged to lie back on one, stare up at the extraordinary display on the ceiling, and drift away to the ambient electronic soundtrack.
Installation view of the gunpowder room showing the beanbags scattered around the floor, at ‘Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, 2024’ by Refik Anadol at Serpentine North. Photo by Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy Refik Anadol Studio and Serpentine
The facts
There are no wall labels in the traditional sense, well, only one big one at the beginning. Most of the information is conveyed on one of their wall-sized projections and, like everything else, is animated i.e. there’s a rotating series of texts explaining the facts, projected onto a background of moving, changing, evolving images.
From this I learned that the entire installation has the umbrella name ‘Living Archive: Large Nature Model’ (2024). Within this sit three specific works, being:
- Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive (2024)
- Artificial Realities: Coral (2023)
- Artificial Realities: Rainforest (2024)
The rainforest one is the one projected on the ceiling of the gunpowder room. The Living Archive is the name of the main one which projects onto the walls of the three main corridors of the gallery, and within it sits the coral one, which appears as an interlude or sequence in among all the other morphing, changing patterns.
Hyper-perfect images of coral portrayed in ‘Artificial Realities: Coral’ by Refik Anadol (2023) Courtesy Refik Anadol Studios
All of this is created using the Large Nature Model, the world’s first open source generative AI model dedicated to images of the natural world. The studio has been developing the LNM as part of the evolving ‘DATALAND’, Anadol’s future museum and Web3 platform devoted to data visualization and AI arts.
If I understand this correctly, the Large Nature Model is an artificial intelligence program into which have been fed scores of millions of images of the natural world – be they birds, flora, fungi and fauna. These were sourced from publicly available images from major institutions such as the Natural History Museum, the Smithsonian Institute and many more.
The sea of digital data as seen in this installation view of ‘Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, 2024’ by Refik Anadol at Serpentine North. Photo by Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy Refik Anadol Studio and Serpentine
The Fact panel on the opening wall lists the sources of the images :
- Smithsonian: 6.3 million public images
- Natural History Museum: 4 million public images
- Herbarium of the Muséum Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle: 4 million images
- Naturalis Biodiversity Centre: 4.5 million images
- New York Botanical Garden: 3.5 million images
- Meise Botanic Garden herbarium: 2.3 million images
- Harvard University Herbaria: 1.4 million images
- Institutio de Pesquisas Jardim Botanico do Rio de Janeiro: 1.2 million images
- International Barcode of Life Project: 1 million images
- Atlas of Living Australia: 5 million images
The bit that struck me about the process description was the explanation of how the image creation is a two-step process: first they use ‘diffusion models’ to create a series of increasingly ‘noisy’ images, presumably meaning blurred, fuzzy, inaccurate. And then the pogram reviews and cleans the images, removing the noise which had been added. The result is to create images with a kind of super-real clarity and cleanness. This was particularly true of the coral sequences, where the coral looks like it had been Photoshopped to remove any blemish or imperfection. It explains the hyper-real nature of all the images, millions of images with all their imperfections removed by a program which has taught itself how nature ought to look.
The image of an unfeasibly perfect flower in ‘Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, 2024’ by Refik Anadol at Serpentine North. Photo by the author
So far, so static. Nowhere did I read an explanation of how millions of static images of nature, no matter how dirtied up and then super cleaned, were turned into animated sequences. You’d have thought that was the core of the process, the thing that the program changes what could just be a slideshow into a mind-blowing animation – yet I hung around by the Fact panel and watched the same series of texts go through two iterations but couldn’t find anything about the animation process.
Critique
Here at Serpentine, on the exhibition wall label, on the gallery’s relevant web page, on Anadol’s website and in articles about him, everyone makes large claims for this approach and these works, saying they will educate and inform people about nature, or change our relationship with the natural world, and so on. As the man himself puts it:
‘Our vision for the Large Nature Model goes beyond being a repository or a creative research initiative. It is a tool for insight, education, and advocacy for the shared environment of humanity.’
Well, as our American friends would put it, I’m calling bullshit on these claims. The way to relate to nature is go outside and experience it. The Serpentine galleries are right in the middle of Hyde Park. A half hour walk round the park, listening to the birds, identifying different trees and plants, would do more for your relationship with ‘nature’ than any amount of slumping on bean bags watching trippy dayglo videos.
I have a garden. In the mornings and evenings I have the window open to listen to the birds. I put out birdfeeders and it’s about time I weeded my flower beds and thought about what to plant. Last year I bought and planted seven trees. Watching plants grow from seedlings or plugs or pots, watering them in, learning about fertiliser and mulch, when to feed, when to prune – that’s engaging with nature and understanding its rhythms.
Not, I suggest, wandering around a flash gallery watching trippy cartoons, rendered clean and sterile for the Instagram generation. It’s a really amazing, mind-blowing experience and it’s FREE so I strongly recommend you go see for yourself. I just don’t buy into the rhetoric about it teaching you anything at all about the natural world, which it doesn’t. It’s an entertainment, a vivid distraction, a painstakingly created one but, at the end of the day, a jaw-dropping spectacle with little or no educational value.
Like all such natural history products, even the gold standard David Attenborough documentaries, it reduces the viewer to a passive onlooker, feeling vaguely edified and engaged without the bother of ever budging from your sofa or, in this case, beanbag. ‘Engaging with nature’ needs a bit more effort than this.
Installation view of ‘Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, 2024’ by Refik Anadol at Serpentine North. Photo by Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy Refik Anadol Studio and Serpentine
Related links
- Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive continues at Serpentine South until 7 April 2024
- Refik Anadol website
- Refik Anadol Wikipedia article
- Refik Anadol launches Large Nature Model At 54th WEF
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