MACHINE HALLUCINATION

The question of why we collect, record, and share our quotidian experiences has always been entangled with the formal and aesthetic concerns about how to represent reality, totality, and the depth of human imagination. Nineteenth century poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé famously said that everything in the world existed to end up in a book. Revisiting Mallarmé’s proposition in her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography, Susan Sonntag wrote, “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” More recently, Jonathan Zittrain, the co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and society, suggested that “internet architecture” lacked a definable center and instead relied on “an extraordinary collective hallucination.” Refik Anadol’s most recent synesthetic reality experiments deeply engage with these centuries-old questions and attempt at revealing new connections between visual narrative, archival instinct and collective consciousness. The project focuses on latent cinematic exper