WDCH Dreams creates an immersive journey of both time and space analyzing 100 years of LA Phil performances with machine intelligence. This installation augments information from every concert season to procedurally generate a tangible and interactive representation of LA Phil’s repertoire.
—Refik Anadol
The Los Angeles Philharmonic collaborated with media artist Refik Anadol to celebrate its history and explore its future. Using machine learning algorithms, Anadol and his team developed a unique machine intelligence approach to the LA Phil’s digital archives – 45 terabytes of data. The results are the stunning visualizations of WDCH Dreams, comprising both a week-long public art installation projected onto the building’s exterior skin and a season-long immersive exhibition in the Ira Gershwin Gallery inside. To make Walt Disney Concert Hall “dream,” Anadol utilized a creative, computerized “mind” to mimic how humans dream – by processing memories to form a new combination of images and ideas. To accomplish this, Anadol worked with the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google Arts and Culture and with researcher Parag K. Mital to apply machine intelligence to the orchestra’s digital archives – 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 according to 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. This “data universe” is Anadol’s material, and machine intelligence is his artistic collaborator. Together, they create something new in image and sound by awakening the metaphorical “consciousness” of Walt Disney Concert Hall. The result is a radical visualization of the organization’s first century and an exploration of synergies between art and technology, between architecture and institutional memory. In order to realize this vision, Anadol employed 42 large scale projectors with 50K visual resolution, 8-channel sound, and 1.2M luminance in total. The resulting patterns, or “data sculptures,” formed by the machine’s interpretation of the archives were displayed directly onto the undulating stainless-steel exterior of Walt Disney Concert Hall. The accompanying soundtrack was created from hand-picked audio from the LA Phil’s archival recordings. Sound designers Robert Thomas and Kerim Karaoglu augmented these selections by using machine-learning algorithms to find similar performances recorded throughout the LA Phil’s history, creating a unique exploration of the LA Phil’s historic audio recordings.