When particles collide

When paintings by Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael meet artificial intelligence the visual results are surprising.

“The focus is generally on Leonardo because Leonardo is not just a painter but also a scientist. It was a perfect match with our mindset.”

Spending six years collecting data seems like the type of work most creatives would avoid. For digital media artist Ferdi Alici, however, there is a method to this madness.

Alici and his team of in-house artists, engineers, animaters, coders and designers, have been creating algorithms that integrate artificial intelligence in their multimedia artworks. So far, they’ve had the right effect.

“We’re trying to integrate science and technology inside the public space, and by doing so we have already created more than 50 art pieces around the world,” says Alici, who founded Istanbul-based creative media studio Ouchhh with his wife Eylul 10 years ago.

Making art across different disciplines has always been a point of interest for Alici, 40, who studied visual communication and design at Istanbul University. But his interest in AI came from something else entirely – a single question he read in an academic paper written in 1950 by mathematician Alan Turing, the man who cracked the German Enigma Code in World War II.

“Alan Turing asked the question ‘Can machines think?’, and so for the last six years we have been asking the same question with different senses, like ‘Can machines create art? Can machines read? Can machines make music?’ It’s those questions that started us on this journey of different ways of thinking about art,” he explains. “Now we have already used every type of AI algorithm in the world to create new art displays.”

Alici’s latest exhibition in this body of work, Wisdom of AI Light, will headline the Illuminate Adelaide festival this month.

“The architectural installation brings our art alive as a 3D sculpture,” Alici says. “It’s not just a database but an incredibly experimental form of architecture.”

The display will be monumental; so big, in fact, Alici has needed to build a pavilion, measuring 1000sq m with a 9m-high high ceiling, in Adelaide’s East End large enough to house it.

Audiences entering the pavilion will recognise brushstrokes from paintings by Renaissance artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. Twenty-four data projectors will beam original paintings by Renaissance artists on to the walls before the particles disperse into new images that “have never existed before”. Displayed on the walls, floor and ceiling of the pavilion in bright bursts of colour and movement, this “data sculpture” will completely envelop the audience.

“We collected data from Italian art history, which takes in approximately 20,000 different brushstrokes from 340 artists, which we feed into our algorithms,” Alici explains. “The AI then starts to create two totally new images which never existed before with billions of particles. It’s huge and complex for the public to see … and more immersive than IMAX technology.”

A data sculpture based on Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

It’s the work of these artistic “rock stars”, as Alici refers to them, that forms the “first chapter” of the immersive painting. “The focus is generally on Leonardo because Leonardo is not just a painter but also a scientist. It was a perfect match with our mindset.”

The exhibition will show from July 16 when Adelaide’s streets and buildings will glow during the month-long festival. Creatives from all over the world will be exhibiting their work alongside Alici, including the world famous “virtual” band Gorillaz, who have been playing their genre-bending beats to crowds for the past 24 years. The festival will also feature international series Klassik underground, an immersive concert series that combines classical music with live visuals from leading Australian artists.

As the festival’s artist in residence, Ouchhh Studios will continue its long tradition of creating public artworks that integrate art and science. The company has previously collaborated with the likes of NASA and CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), which runs the largest particle physics laboratory in the world.

“Every project has a scientific background,” Alici says. “Our work is built on a dream we’ve had from the very beginning which is to create multidimensional art made by AI.”

In its collaboration with NASA, Ouchhh repurposed data collected by the Kepler space telescope, which observed around 2500 exoplanets (planets outside the Solar System) while it was looking for potentially habitable worlds for people. The telescope, which was named after astronomer Johannes Kepler, was first launched in 2009 and has since retired after running out of fuel in 2018.

Alici and his team sought help from NASA’s Dawn Gelino, an astrophysicist who specialises in the search for and study of exoplanets, to interpret the data.

“Every project has a scientific background,” Alici says.

“She was the perfect person to collaborate with,” Alici says. “She lives in California and has been working with NASA her entire life so having her join in on the artistic process was so educational. There are infinite possibilities when scientists and artists work together.”

With the help of Gelino – who, according to her Tedx Talk, is “helping humanity get ready for an alternative planet when planet Earth will no longer be viable in 100,000 years” – Alici turned the data set into a work called DATAGATE, which transformed the numbers collected by the telescope into musical notes so the exoplanet data “started making a symphony”, a 3D animation that moves and morphs around the audience.

It’s the first NASA astronomical data sculpture in the world.

“We have the same mindset as painters did 500 years ago, but we are using data as paint and algorithms as our brush and architectural spaces as our canvas,” Alici says. “For sure, there are some traditional painters who try to understand what the deal is behind each project but there seems to be an appreciation that this is not just some cool abstract animation. There’s actually exponential scientific processes occurring.”

Alici has spent six years creating Wisdom of AI Light and says the project has taken so long because as a “new artist” he “wants to use the right data for the right purposes”.”

“Data painting is not just about the video but it’s also the tricky architectural installation,” he says. “This is a totally digital experience, but it is also traditional.”

Illuminate Adelaide, July 1 to July 31.