Data Dreams: Art and AI is a part of the Sydney International Art Series 2025-26, and is being held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia).
This exhibition invites audiences to reflect on the evolving relationship between human and machine intelligences whilst experiencing some of the possible futures our current day could lead to.
Data Dreams foregrounds many contemporary concerns including the interactions of technology and power, the environmental costs of the data economy, and the impacts from algorithms and datasets on our worldview and perceptions of reality.
This is a groundbreaking exhibition brings together 10 boundary-pushing artists from across the globe, including our own Professor Angie Abdilla, and our 2022-2023 Cybernetic Imagination Resident Kate Crawford.
Professor Angie Abdilla#
Meditation on Country (2024) brings Indigenous knowledge systems into dialogue with Western astrophysics, combining scientific and cultural datasets.
Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler#
Anatomy of an AI System (2018) is a visual investigation to make visible the human labour, data, and planetary resources that go into a singular Amazon Echo.
Fabien Giraud#
The Feral (2025-3025) is a film created over a thousand years, fully shot and edited by an AI, set amongst a dramatic landscape in central France and including 32 generations of humans.
Lynn Hershman Leeson#
Logic Paralyzes the Heart (2021) and Cyborgian Rhapsody: Immortality (2023) from the Cyborg film series (1994-2023) are films that trace the radical ways that AI and technology reshape our lives, societies, and also the environment.
Agnieszka Kurant#
Chemical Garden (2021/2025) and Conversions (2019-ongoing) are works that use growing crystals, either painted or sculptural, to demonstrate AI both as an intentional artistic collaborator, and a responsive collaborator (based on emotional data).
Trevor Paglen#
Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations (2017 – ongoing) is an artwork that uses uncanny AI-powered images that probs the limits of machine perception through inviting us to look inside the strange world of datasets and neural networks.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas#
The Finesse (2022) is a video installation of a simulated forest that blends popular culture and political science together, inviting audiences to discern the truth for themselves.
Hito Steyerl#
Mechanical Kurds (2025) is an installations that blends documentary footage with AI-generated imagery and sculptures in digital form to examine the hidden human labour behind the systems of AI-led warfare and surveillance.
Anicka Yi#
Each Branch Of Coral Holds Up The Light Of The Moon (2024) and Radiolaria (2023-24) look to possibilities for intelligence and collaboration beyond the organic and human through a series of luminous suspended sculptures and an AI-generated 3D animation which will carry on Yi’s art practice following her death.