New Home For The Humanities At Oxford

“Archive Dreaming” will greet visitors at the Saturday public opening of Oxford University’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, a new hub for the university’s humanities programs: English language and literature, history, linguistics, philology and phonetics, medieval and modern languages, music, philosophy and theology. The center opened to academics in October and is now launching its cultural programming.

“It’s a place where we can all come together to make sense of what it means to be human in today’s world,” John Fulljames, director of the cultural program, said in a statement.

To realize “Archive Dreaming,” Anadol and his team drew on a collection of almost 68,000 botanical images from Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, one of the oldest and most significant library systems in the world.

“This library is a hero library,” said the 40-year-old artist, one of the inaugural visiting artistic fellows at the Schwarzman Centre. To “anyone working with data, anyone that knows libraries and loves archives and books and knowledge, it’s one of the most incredible archives in the world. It’s a dream to be able to experiment with this data.”

Anadol has used high-resolution images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to create immersive Marscapes and turned neurobiological data like heart rate, skin conductance and electroencephalogram outputs to illustrate first-time travelers’ emotional journeys.

For the installation at Oxford, he turned to the university’s Herbaria, a vast collection of botanical specimens, images and illustrations dating from the mid-17th century onward that’s used for research, teaching and taxonomy.

His team generated AI-generated videos from Herbaria images by prompting a diffusion model. These systems slowly refine random visual noise into a coherent image based on patterns learned from data.

But the mesmerizing colors and shapes that swirl through “Archive Dreaming” do more than evoke nature’s grandeur and mystery. They also point to technology’s potential for turning static repositories of information into something that lives and thinks, according to Anadol.

“It's like nature as a mind,” he said. “Archives are generally frozen entities. With machine intelligence, we are trying to rewire our understanding of how [they] could be imagined.”

Other Schwarzman Centre artistic fellows who will access Oxford resources and collaborate with its academics for new work include Grammy- and Pulitzer Prize-winning folk musician Rhiannon Giddens; renowned British choreographer and director Sir Wayne McGregor; contemporary-art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist; and Tony Award-winning stage designer Es Devlin, who has crafted stages for Beyoncé and Kanye West.

The Schwarzman Centre opens to the public as automation touches every aspect of our lives, from the workplace to education, hospitality and design. It incorporates Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI, which launched in 2021.

In the art world, the phrase “AI art” evokes an array of responses, from excitement to fear and defiance. Anadol, while lauded as an AI art pioneer, hasn’t been immune from charges of creating “AI slop.”

AI Art As A Milestone, And A Test

“Choosing an AI artwork to inaugurate a major humanities space is a statement that this technology belongs in the conversation about culture, not outside it,” Raphaël Millière, an associate professor of theoretical philosophy with the institute, said in an interview.

But legitimization without scrutiny misses the point, he added.

“It can be tempting to put a spectacular AI artwork in a beautiful room and let the spectacle be the whole conversation,” Millière said. “That would be a missed opportunity, and not what a place like Oxford is for. What drew me to this collaboration is that Refik has been unusually willing to engage with deep and difficult questions about data, authorship and the role of AI in his artistic process.”

Anadol believes it’s important that artists be transparent about their use of AI, and also that the public distinguishes between the many ways artists incorporate the tools.

“I love all the current AI models, and I love working with them,” Anadol said, “but when artists custom-create a model, work with their own datasets, travel across the world and collect petabytes of data, it has to be treated differently.”

That distinction is, increasingly, the focus of his practice.

Anadol co-founded Dataland, billed as the first museum dedicated to AI art. It’s set to open June 20 at the Grand LA, an entertainment and residential development in downtown Los Angeles designed by Frank Gehry.

“Denying all AI technologies as an artistic medium will not protect art, it just limits it,” Anadol said. “The artists who embrace new tools don't replace the old masters. They just join them.”