A New Experiential Gallery Just Might Change Your Mind About AI Art
A New Experiential Gallery Just Might Change Your Mind About AI Art
一家全新的体验式画廊或许会改变你对人工智能艺术的看法
“I think we are literally in a renaissance,” says the artist Refik Anadol, in a characteristically optimistic comment, when asked how he sees this moment in art history, with artificial intelligence ascendant yet controversial as a medium. “We just don’t have a name for it yet.” “我认为我们正处于一场真正的文艺复兴之中，”艺术家雷菲克·阿纳多尔（Refik Anadol）在被问及如何看待当前艺术史上的这一时刻时，给出了他一贯乐观的评价。当时，人工智能作为一种媒介正处于上升期，但也备受争议。“我们只是还没给它起个名字。”
Anadol, known for technological installations that probe the relationship between humans and machines, has reason to be happy. On June 20, Dataland, the cutting-edge downtown Los Angeles gallery he cofounded with studio partner Efsun Erkılıç, opened its doors to an eager public. Billed as the first “museum of AI arts” in the world, it welcomed more than 10,000 visitors to the opening exhibit in the first two weeks, Anadol tells WIRED. 阿纳多尔以探索人机关系的科技装置艺术而闻名，他有理由感到高兴。6月20日，他与工作室合伙人埃夫孙·埃尔克勒奇（Efsun Erkılıç）共同创立的前沿画廊“Dataland”在洛杉矶市中心开幕，迎接了热情的公众。阿纳多尔告诉《连线》（WIRED）杂志，作为全球首家“人工智能艺术博物馆”，该画廊在开幕展的前两周内就接待了超过1万名参观者。
The set piece is his most ambitious to date, an immersive architectural vision titled Machine Dreams: Rainforest. Its interactive digital displays, directly responding to the visitors’ movements and biometric data (tracked by wearable devices), produce ever-shifting images and soundscapes drawn from Anadol’s Large Nature Model, an AI system built using natural science archives from prestigious research institutions like the Smithsonian. 此次展览的核心作品是他迄今为止最宏大的沉浸式建筑愿景，名为《机器梦境：雨林》（Machine Dreams: Rainforest）。其交互式数字显示屏能直接响应参观者的动作和生物识别数据（通过可穿戴设备追踪），并生成不断变化的图像和音景。这些内容源自阿纳多尔的“大型自然模型”（Large Nature Model），这是一个利用史密森尼学会等权威研究机构的自然科学档案构建的人工智能系统。
“For three years, we started from scratch and trained our own AI models, and we worked with our own data sets,” Anadol says. He and his team traveled to the Amazon and other rainforests to capture raw material that would fuel the model’s hallucinated versions of those environments. “We have 5 petabytes worth of raw data that we collected by ourselves,” Anadol says. He’s proud that Dataland made a point of sourcing this trove with the consent and participation of researchers, whereas Silicon Valley’s major AI firms have faced backlash and lawsuits over what many creators say is unlicensed, extractive use of their content as training data. “三年来，我们从零开始训练自己的人工智能模型，并使用我们自己的数据集，”阿纳多尔说。他和他的团队前往亚马逊和其他雨林采集原始素材，为模型对这些环境的“幻觉式”重构提供动力。“我们拥有自己收集的5拍字节（PB）原始数据，”阿纳多尔说。他引以为傲的是，Dataland坚持在获得研究人员同意和参与的前提下获取这些资源，而硅谷的主要人工智能公司却因被许多创作者指控未经许可、掠夺性地使用其内容作为训练数据而面临抵制和诉讼。
Anadol adds that Google DeepMind gave Dataland access to “experimental low-energy” resources, allowing the gallery to run on Google Cloud and maintain “sustainable compute.” (Anadol has collaborated with the tech giant since becoming the first person awarded the Google Artists and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency in 2016.) 阿纳多尔补充说，Google DeepMind为Dataland提供了“实验性低能耗”资源，使画廊能够在谷歌云上运行并保持“可持续计算”。（自2016年成为首位获得“谷歌艺术家与机器智能驻留项目”奖项的人以来，阿纳多尔一直与这家科技巨头保持合作。）
Ethics, environmental responsibility, and a wholehearted effort to produce what feels like a living, breathing ecosystem with artificial intelligence: These commitments are crucial if Anadol and Dataland want to redefine “AI art.” The very phrase is a nonstarter for many creatives and critics of the generative “slop” that has infested visual media at every level. Anadol is perfectly aware of people rejecting that stuff, and he hardly blames them. “I mean, 100 percent, the majority is right,” he says, noting that when someone hears about AI art, “their first assumption is like, prompt engineering, or a bunch of eight-second clips.” 伦理、环境责任，以及全心全意利用人工智能创造出一个仿佛有生命、会呼吸的生态系统的努力：如果阿纳多尔和Dataland想要重新定义“人工智能艺术”，这些承诺至关重要。对于许多创作者和评论家来说，“人工智能艺术”这个词本身就令人反感，因为生成式“垃圾内容”已经渗透到视觉媒体的各个层面。阿纳多尔非常清楚人们对这些东西的抵触，他并不责怪他们。“我的意思是，百分之百，大多数人是对的，”他说，并指出当人们听到人工智能艺术时，“他们的第一反应就是提示词工程，或者一堆八秒钟的短视频。”
His new gallery aims to prove that there are grand possibilities beyond all that. “The reason for Dataland is to understand and explain and explore—and tell the world that there is not only one option,” he says. 他的新画廊旨在证明，除了这些之外，还有更宏大的可能性。“Dataland存在的意义在于理解、解释和探索，并告诉世界，选择不止一种，”他说。
Machine Dreams: Rainforest makes an impressive case for AI as a tool to unlock surprising modes of artistic engagement. (Anadol claims that it is his first project where “it is impossible to record what it feels like,” and it’s no exaggeration.) After going through a somewhat finicky entrance procedure involving a waiver and a specialized app, I receive a smartwatch and a U-shaped plastic collar to be worn over my shoulders. As these are calibrated, the shoulder harness emits the first of the exhibit’s many striking scents: here in the heart of this hypermodern building, I can suddenly smell trees. 《机器梦境：雨林》令人印象深刻地证明了人工智能可以作为一种工具，开启令人惊叹的艺术参与模式。（阿纳多尔声称这是他第一个“无法记录其感受”的项目，这绝非夸张。）在经历了一套略显繁琐的入场程序（包括签署免责声明和使用专用应用程序）后，我领到了一块智能手表和一个挂在肩上的U型塑料项圈。当设备校准时，肩带散发出展览中许多独特气味中的第一种：在这座超现代建筑的中心，我突然闻到了树木的味道。
The largest gallery is empty but for a couple of pillars, with ultravivid fusions of nature scenes and computer-chip textures swimming across the walls and floor; there’s a 40-minute cycle of varied effects that I quickly realize are partly dependent on the movements of everyone in the room. I enter during a sequence simulating heavy rain and thunder and see that each visitor has a watery circle around their feet that travels with them, becoming an aqueous streak when they walk faster. The paths of droplets in the downpour shift if you wave a hand in front of them. There’s even the clean smell of a summer storm emanating from my biosensor. 最大的展厅空荡荡的，只有几根柱子，墙壁和地板上游动着自然景观与计算机芯片纹理的超生动融合；这里有一个40分钟的循环特效，我很快意识到，这些效果部分取决于房间里每个人的动作。我进入时正值模拟暴雨和雷鸣的片段，我看到每位参观者的脚下都有一个随之移动的水圈，当他们走得更快时，水圈会变成一道水痕。如果你在倾盆大雨中挥动手臂，雨滴的路径也会随之改变。我的生物传感器甚至散发出夏日暴雨后的清新气息。
Anadol says that while you have the option to move through his artwork as a “ghost”—that is, without the biosensors—the wearables, which are modified medical grade devices, offer a way to put your fingerprint on it, at least temporarily. “For almost 5,000 years, we as humanity, we look at artworks and we feel something,” he says. “At Dataland, as a laboratory of imagination, our first deep question is: Can artwork feel us back?” 阿纳多尔说，虽然你可以选择以“幽灵”身份（即不佩戴生物传感器）穿梭于他的艺术作品中，但这些经过改良的医疗级可穿戴设备提供了一种方式，让你至少能暂时在作品上留下自己的指纹。“近5000年来，作为人类，我们欣赏艺术作品并产生感受，”他说。“在作为想象力实验室的Dataland，我们提出的第一个深刻问题是：艺术作品能感受到我们吗？”
Anadol laughs when I wonder aloud whether the gadgets tracked my trip to the restroom. “No, no, no, no, the restroom has zero connection,” he says. Moreover, he says, the museum “forgets” your data the moment you leave, though it remains available to the visitor by way of a personal token received at the exit. “Data is a form of memory,” Anadol says, and the gallery seeks to treat it with respect. “So it’s the opposite,” he notes “of what we have in the whole world,” where invasive surveillance has become the norm. 当我大声问这些设备是否追踪了我去洗手间的行程时，阿纳多尔笑了。“不，不，不，不，洗手间没有任何连接，”他说。此外，他表示，博物馆在你离开的那一刻就会“忘记”你的数据，尽管参观者可以通过出口处收到的个人令牌获取这些数据。“数据是一种记忆形式，”阿纳多尔说，画廊力求尊重数据。“所以这与我们在整个世界中所经历的恰恰相反，”他指出，在当今世界，侵入式监控已成为常态。
Farther on lies the Infinity Room, which invites me to follow a glittery hummingbird as it soars over a fantastical neon forest—the flight puts one in mind of the aerial acrobatics in the Avatar movies, and at times I find myself a little off-balance when the POV careens one way or the other. I’m more intrigued by an adjacent wing, the Latent Gallery, where I can take a peek behind the curtain of the Large Nature Model. At one console, for example, I can scroll through the training data by category. I click “Frogs,” and the wall in front of me turns into a massive grid of frog photos included in the model. 再往前走是“无限空间”（Infinity Room），它邀请我跟随一只闪闪发光的蜂鸟飞越一片梦幻般的霓虹森林——这种飞行让人想起电影《阿凡达》中的空中特技，有时当视角向一侧倾斜时，我会感到有些失去平衡。我更感兴趣的是隔壁的“潜空间画廊”（Latent Gallery），在那里我可以一窥“大型自然模型”背后的奥秘。例如，在控制台上，我可以按类别浏览训练数据。我点击“青蛙”，面前的墙壁瞬间变成了一个巨大的网格，展示着模型中包含的所有青蛙照片。
Anadol says he wanted people to have a glimpse of the profound wealth of information underlying… 阿纳多尔说，他希望人们能一窥隐藏在背后的深厚信息财富……