Refik Anadol has made history as one of two prominent digital artists to have their works acquired into the permanent collection of the 94-year-old Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

The museum announced its acquisition of Anadol’s 2022 Generative AI piece Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations, along with the blockchain-based piece 3FACE. 2022 from artist Ian Cheng, this week. Anadol's work was a gift to the museum by the 1OF1 Collection (which is led by Ryan Zurrer) and the RFC Collection, which is led by Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile and Desiree Casoni.

Writing on Instagram, Anadol commended the museum’s curatorial decision, saying it “inscribes a historic chapter as MoMA welcomes the first Generative AI and tokenized artwork into its esteemed permanent collection.” The work was one of three made for last year’s special solo exhibition using a machine learning algorithm to interpret publicly available data taken from the museum’s collection to produce reinterpreted images that continuously evolve (e.g., hallucinate) into compositions that “[reimagine] the trajectory of modern art.”

“This project reshapes the relationship between the physical and the virtual, the real and the unreal,” the exhibition’s co-organizer, Michelle Kuo, said at the time. “Often, AI is used to classify, process, and generate realistic representations of the world. Anadol’s work, by contrast, is visionary: It explores dreams, hallucination, and irrationality, posing an alternate understanding of modern art — and of artmaking itself.”

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Machine Hallucinations has also graced the new Sphere in Las Vegas recently and was included in the stage design for the 2023 Grammy Awards this spring. It expands on a “first-of-its-kind” suite of digital artworks that premiered in an NFT collection auctioned by Sotheby’s in September of 2021, the same month Anadol sat down with Archinect's Niall Patrick Walsh for an interview about the future direction of his technology-driven practice.

Anadol's NFT of the Casa Batlló also sold at a separate auction for $1.38 million last year. His further reflections on the MoMA project can be found here.