UCLA hosts art installation at sculpture garden to promote reflection on pandemic

This post was updated May 4 at 10:22 p.m.

UCLA hosted a temporary art installation by artist Refik Anadol at a ceremony to commemorate two years of resilience throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

On April 19, in partnership with the School of the Arts and Architecture, Chancellor Gene Block unveiled design media arts lecturer Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations: Nature, an immersive artificial intelligence data sculpture, which was visible in the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden from April 20 to 24.

At the event, Block spoke to the crowd – including many UCLA students and faculty – about the adversities brought on and exacerbated by the pandemic over the past two years. Beyond the grief in the death toll of the COVID-19 virus, the pandemic also worsened racial and class disparities, economic crises and polarizing politics, which put many communities in difficult situations, Block said.

“We’ve been doing some celebrating that we’re all back together, but we needed a time also just to come together to replay a really tough time,” he said. “This gives us an opportunity as a community to come together and recognize the pain we’ve all been through these past two years.”

The installation was visible on a screen, which projected a moving digital artwork that involved myriad spheres coming together to form different shapes in many different colors. The piece also included ambient sound.

Anadol, who is also an alumnus, said he appreciated the opportunity to present his art at his former place of study. UCLA is a place of innovation and discovery beyond simply creating art, he said.

“It’s one of the most grateful times of life, almost a decade ago in this garden,” Anadol said. “I was dreaming about one day, AI and data can become a sculpture,” Anadol said.

Attendees said they enjoyed the piece and came to celebrate art.

Lucy Huo, a fourth-year computer science student, said she heard about the event from friends in the design media arts program and was glad to see the university showcase and support artists. She liked how natural the piece’s movement was and the atmospheric music, she added.

Despite the crowd, the artwork’s size and place outside also allowed for it to be enjoyed individually, said Yi Jiang, a graduate student of architecture and urban design. She was fascinated by the color transitions of the work and glad to have a chance to learn more about art beyond her chosen program at the university, she added. Despite art and architecture being housed under the same department, they don’t always collaborate, but this event gave her a chance to, she said.

Erin Cooney, a design media arts lecturer and alumnus, said UCLA’s space was a wonderful place to show artists’ work.

“It made me definitely appreciate a sense of beauty, but then when I started to reflect on it sort of more intellectually, I felt like a flow of thought in a sense,” Cooney said. “It opens up all sorts of ideas of introspection and questioning.”

Attendees said the event also inspired thought about moving back to normality after the pandemic.

The event’s mention of the two-year anniversary of the start of the pandemic caught her off guard, Huo said. She could still remember when the crisis began and hadn’t considered how much time had passed since then, Huo added.

Laure Michelon, a lecturer in the architecture and urban design IDEAS campus, said that for her, the event felt like a reunion between students and friends.

“I think we, as a community, in a larger sense, tried to foster this over Zoom and over the internet and, in some ways, digitally did an OK job,” Michelon said. “But there’s, in my mind, no way to really recreate the feeling of all being and experiencing this together. It’s very fun.”