NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art announces an innovative slate of fall 2023winter 2024 acquisitions, exhibitions, and artist collaborations that encourage new thinking about human and machine intelligence, creativity, and the potential of art and technology to reshape our physical and digital worlds. Supported by a strong foundation of related research, commissions, publications, and exhibitions involving digital or computer- generated artincluding The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (1968), Information (1970), Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 19591989 (2017), New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century (2019), Philippe Parrenos Echo (2019), Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design (2022), Signals: How Video Transformed the World (2023), recent collection installations of JODIs My%Desktop (2002) and Eduardo Kacs Reabracadabra (1985), and more than a decade of MoMA R&D programs and the blockchain projects MoMA Memento and MoMA Postcard these new initiatives underscore MoMAs longstanding commitment to support artists who experiment with emerging technologies to expand their visual vocabularies and creative exploration, increase the impact of their work, and help us understand and navigate transformative change in the world.
Refik Anadol. Unsupervised Machine Hallucinations MoMA. 2022 New acquisition, on view through October 29, 2023
This landmark acquisition, a three-part digital artwork by Refik Anadol that uses generative artificial intelligence to interpret and transform more than 200 years of art from MoMAs collection, is made possible by the generosity of 1OF1, led by Ryan Zurrer, and the RFC Collection, led by Pablo Rodríguez-Fraile and Desiree Casoni. In Unsupervised Machine Hallucinations MoMA, Anadol has created a singular and unprecedented meditation on technology, creativity, and modern art, that continuously generates new forms on a large- scale media wall. The work responds to inputs from the environment and is tokenized on the blockchain. Unsupervised is on view in the Museums ground-floor Gund Lobby through October 29, 2023.
Ian Cheng. 3FACE. 2022 New acquisition
This groundbreaking acquisition, made possible through the generosity of Outland Art, is Ian Chengs most ambitious experimental artwork to date to explore blockchain technologies and the decentralization of data. 3FACE is an adaptive artwork grounded in the artists interest in the capacity of humans to relate to change. 3FACE analyzes the wallet data of its web3 owners online behavior to generate a visual portrait of the forces that compose the owners personality. This new acquisition joins Chengs trilogy Emissaries in
MoMAs collection, which was acquired in 2016 and debuted in full at MoMA PS1 in 2017, with a subsequent presentation of Emissary Forks at Perfection (201516) in the 2019 MoMA exhibition New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century.
Leslie Thornton. HANDMADE. 2023
Presented in a new exhibition opening November 4, 2023
Leslie Thornton continues to push the boundaries of film, video, and sound in her innovative body of work, which spans more than five decades. On November 4, MoMA will debut Thorntons newest work, HANDMADE (2023), which contemplates the relationship between what the artist calls the space of the world and the space of science. The work is a diptych, juxtaposing layered footage of a storm with images of a handwoven device made by a physicist at the California Institute of Technology for use in a research project on antimatter, as well as film recordings of flow studies that Thornton uncovered while she was the first artist-in-residence at the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture in 2019.
MoMA audiences will be familiar with Thorntons earlier work in the Museums collection: X- TRACTS [Titles] (1975), Jennifer, Where Are You? [Titles] (1981), Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Prologue (1984), and Luna (2013), which was included in New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century at MoMA in 2019. HANDMADE will be presented in the Museums ground-floor Gund Lobby on the 24 × 24″ screen designed by and realized with thanks to Refik Anadol Studio.
MoMA and Feral Filewith artists including Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Yoko Ono, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, and 0xDEAFBEEF
New online exhibition opening early 2024
Building on the success of the 2021 first-of-its-kind collaboration and online exhibition Unsupervised: MoMA Seen through the Mind of a Machine by Refik Anadol, MoMA and digital art platform Feral File will launch a new project in 2024, working with contemporary artists including Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Yoko Ono, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, and 0xDEAFBEEF. Each artist will explore sound, art, and technology, presenting digital artworks that will be interactive and freely viewable online. More details will be announced later this year.