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To bring together more than 100 artists, designers and collectives from more than 30 countries, featuring 86 projects, in the era of COVID, was always going to be a tall ask. It has happened and it has a huge “wow” factor with a mixture of major household names as well as completely unexpected, quirky discoveries.

The Triennial 2020 is built around four broad themes with porous borders: Illumination, Reflection, Conservation and Speculation. Even after wading through the voluminous catalogue — more like a piece of bulky furniture than a read-in-bed book — the themes are more like general conceptual props than clear categories.

The concern is with the ability for art to challenge assumptions about the status quo, alert us to impending disasters, suggest alternatives, dazzle us with unexpected inventions and inspire us with wondrous creations of undreamt-of beauty.

Based in LA, Turkish digital artist Refik Anadol brings his signature style of AI and media-enriched works to explore the relationship between technology and art. His futuristic piece Quantum Memories draws upon a dataset of more than two hundred million nature-related images from the internet processed with quantum computing software, followed by machine learning algorithms.

The natural landscape is converted to a digitalized collective memory in an audio-visual form, where it presents an alternate dimension between generative algorithm and the natural world – exploiting the possibilities of art with AI soon by the transformation of rigid data into a flexible art piece with emotions.

Visit the NGV website to learn more. The “NGV Triennial” exhibition is on display until April 18, 2021.