Tate Modern x Anicka Yi
In Love With The World
What would it feel like to share the world with machines that could live in the wild and evolve on their own?
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Artist Anicka Yi was offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create an interactive installation in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. She sought to use this commission to challenge the public to re-imagine artificial intelligence and encourage visitors to think about new ways machines might inhabit the world.
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Sitara Systems worked with Anicka Yi Studios and the Tate Modern’s Audience Insights team to better understand public opinions about artificial intelligence, and used these insights to inform (and subvert) expectations for the project.
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Sitara Systems developed an artificial life simulation that brought each sculptural to life. The artificial life simulation gave each Aerobe its own unique motivations, goals, and personality traits that guided their behavior in Turbine Hall, and gave audiences the impression of intelligent life.
In Love With The World
The Tate Modern, in partnership with Hyundai Motors, has focused on hosting the world’s most innovative and acclaimed works of contemporary art in its historic Turbine Hall, a former power generation station on the Thames River. The Hyundai Commission grants offer new artists an exciting opportunity to create innovative contemporary artworks for this unique space and reach wider audiences. For the 2021 Hyundai Commission, artist Anicka Yi created an art installation that returned machines to the redeveloped power station -- but rather than industrial machinery, these machines, called aerobes, were an autonomous ecosystem of artificial lifeforms.
Shortly after being awarded the Hyundai Commission in 2019, Anicka Yi approached Sitara Systems a collaborator for her largest and most ambitious project to date for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Anicka Yi’s previous work had drawn from the research of philosophers who are concerned with emerging forms of life and intelligence; for the Hyundai Commission, she sought to create an aquarium of machines, where each machine would be a fully autonomous artificial intelligence that would live in the Turbine Hall. By creating these machines that blurred the boundaries between the biological and the industrial, she hoped to engage the public to reconsider what roles AI could play in our lives, and how we could imagine new possible futures where we lived side-by-side with machines.
