Tate Modern x Anicka Yi
In Love With The World
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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2022 SEGD Global Design Award | Merit: Public Installation
2022 Fast Company Innovation by Design Award | Finalist: Experience Design
2022 Fast Company Innovation by Design Award | Honorable Mention: Experimental Design
2022 CODAworx CODAawards | People's Choice: Top 100
2023 CommArts Interactive Awards | Best In Show
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The New York Times | The Artistic Aromas of Anicka Yi
CNN | Giant floating robots and millennia-old odors make up a new installation at Tate Modern
MuseumNext | AI aerobes occupy Tate’s Turbine Hall in new installation
SEGD | Floating Robots: Artificial Intelligence on Display at the Tate
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.
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.
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.