Combining music, art and machine learning, a magical transformation of the Walt Disney Concert Hall was created to celebrate to 100th anniversary of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall (WDCH) is by any standards an arresting impressive building and, when it was designed in the 1990's, architect Frank Gehry dreamed that images and videos might one day be projected on it. As this video explains the dream finally became a reality thanks to a collaboration between the LA Phil and Turkish-born media artist Refik Anadol, with the support of the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google Arts and Culture which led to WDCH Dreams. 

The WDCH project project led to both a week-long public art installation projected onto the building’s exterior skin at the end of September 2018 and a season-long immersive exhibition in the Ira Gershwin Gallery, inside the building.

To create the "hallucinations", multiple machine learning algorithms analyzed the LS Phil's digital archive to generate new images and sound. Nearly 45 terabytes of data were involved  – 587,763 image files, 1,880 video files, 1,483 metadata files, and 17,773 audio files (the equivalent of 40,000 hours of audio from 16,471 performances). The files were parsed into millions of data points that were then categorized by hundreds of attributes, by deep neural networks with the capacity to both remember the totality of the LA Phil’s “memories” and create new connections between them.

According to its description on Refik Anadol website,  

The result is a radical visualization of the organization’s first century and an exploration of synergies between art and technology, and architecture and institutional memory.

 While the LA Phil site commented that:

This public art installation will project transformed archival materials onto the exterior of Walt Disney Concert Hall in animated, data-driven patterns, seeming to give consciousness to the architectural landmark.

More Information

AI brings “dreams” to life at the Walt Disney Concert Hall

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