Painting With Data - From Charles Fink To Refik Anadol
Sometime during the summer of 2018, I was thumbing through an almost-current edition of Forbes magazine and stumbled upon an article titled The World Will Be Painted With Data by Charles Fink. The article - and its title’s visual imagery - has stayed with me ever since.
In his article, Mr. Fink spoke about the future of Augmented Reality (AR), characterized by futuristic looking Head Mounted Displays. It foretold the advances that were coming, such as Universal Visual Browsers (UVB) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The picture he painted was mesmerizing.
At the time, I was working in a senior product position for a leading Digital Signage service provider and (naturally) began questioning how this AR future would translate to the physical world? Retail customers I was supporting were all strategizing how digital signage could help attract customers and bridge the world of online and in-store shopping. In parallel, I was working with more industrial applications where data visualization could significantly impact the bottom line.
I soon became a follower of Charles Fink, consuming everything I could find, imagining a world that was painted with data.
A Visit To MoMA
In May 2023, this world I have been trying to imagine turned into reality when my wife and I spent a day at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
As we passed through the turnstiles and stepped into the atrium, a magnificent floor-to-ceiling digital display captivated me. I walked closer, sat on a bench, and spent the next hour staring at an infinite loop of molten geometric forms, ever-morphing before my eyes. Fascinated, I began staring at the corners of the display, unsure of where the display ended and where the wall began.
This work of art was Unsupervised by Turkish-American artist Refik Anadol. This work leverages a “sophisticated machine-learning model to interpret publicly available data on the comprehensive MoMA collection combined with environmental inputs on the real-time light, movement, and acoustics of the museum lobby to create this piece of perpetual art.”
While most of the world tries to visualize data to represent analytic insights, Refik Anadol uses it to “explore fantasy, hallucination, and irrationality.” This opens up a world few have ever dreamed of.
When I consider how far things have evolved in the five years from Charles Fink’s article to my viewing of Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised at MoMA, the future seems limitless.
Links:
Forbes article The World Will Be Painted With Data:
Quoted items are taken from this MoMA webpage on Unsupervised by Refik Anadol:
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5535
Refik Anadol’s Website: