There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books,” writes Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt. “Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one's head?” Centuries later, even for us who are not living in the midst of this “virtually inconceivable plentitude,” the vast corpus of creative works and knowledge that have been produced, re-produced, and circulated during Renaissance remains bewilderingly unimaginable. For Palazzo Strozzi, Refik Anadol Studio unveils an alternative way of looking at Renaissance painting archives through the lens of artificial intelligence.

Coining the terms “AI Data Painting” and “AI Data Sculpture,” Refik Anadol has invited his audience to imagine alternative and dynamic realities by re-defining the functionalities of both interior and exterior architectural elements. He tackles this by moving beyond the integration of media into built forms and translating the logic of a new media technology into spatial design. For this site-specific AI Data Sculpture, Anadol and his team collected a dataset including 12.000 thousands of paintings produced between 14th and 17th centuries to create “Renaissance Dreams” in the mind of a machine. These datasets have been processed through StyleGAN2 ADA algorithm with Latent Space Browser that become proficient in mirroring the styles and contents of Renaissance paintings. Creating a unique, immersive experience in the machine’s latent Renaissance data universe, the installation displays an entirely new and poetic way of renewing our connection to the eternal traces of art history.