To create this year TIME100 AI cover, artist Refik Anadolincluded on this year's list, trained his studio's artificial intelligence system on an archive containing each of the more than 5,000 TIME covers to date, spanning more than 100 years. According to him, the resulting abstract rendering, showcasing Anadol's signature fluid molecular aesthetic, represents an AI “dreaming” of TIME's century-long visual past.
Named Large nature model Created by world-renowned Turkish-American media artist Anadol and his team, its modular, multi-modal artificial intelligence system is the product of extensive research and collaboration. According to Anadol's studio, the model was trained on “the most extensive, ethically curated dataset of the natural world,” combining more than half a billion images from the archives of organizations including the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution and the Natural History Museum of London, with data collected directly from 16 rainforests. Anadol, whose work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, London's Serpentine Galleries and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, has also worked with tech giants. Nvidia and Google Cloud providing computing resources, while models such as Meta's Llama and Google's Gemini play a number of roles under the hood.
The model deconstructed each TIME cover, extracting data about thematic and historical context and using this data as a clue. Anadol explains that they used the system in two modes: “future cover” and “archive sleep.” First, the goal was to use “models from the last hundred years to create paths to a hopeful future,” presenting hypothetical covers featuring unborn heroes who could one day use AI to solve historical problems. Others feature people doing work that doesn't yet exist, such as “a symbiotic architect designing buildings that are integrated living ecosystems” or “a chief memory curator responsible for archiving our digital and physical past.” As Anadol says: “Can we use AI to dream about new jobs? Can we use AI to find solutions to the problems we have created?”
While these imagined futures informed the conceptual framework of the project, the final cover emerged from a second mode—the “archival dream”—which is a synthesis of the TIME archive filtered through its sensibilities. The main image was created by artificial intelligence, while the cover details—such as the text, gallery context, and Anadol's silhouette included for a sense of scale—were created by humans: “a true collaboration between man and machine,” he says. Online, the cover can be viewed as a smooth looping video.
So far, the work resembles his successful 2022. exhibition“Unattended” at MoMA, which has attracted nearly three million people, Anadol explains that the conceptual and technical basis of each project is fundamentally different, and each represents a different path of machine creativity. MoMA's goal was to develop its own aesthetic logic. In creating TIME, Anadol wanted his naturalistic system to respond to human history. “Ultimately, this project is an invitation. The future is not a fixed destination to be feared, but a fluid reality that we can truly shape,” he says.
In 2023, Unsupervised became the first blockchain-tokenized artwork to be added to MoMA's permanent inventory. collection. This moment represented an institutional invitation into the artistic canon. He views his TIME magazine cover story—an “iconic canvas”—as another such moment. In some ways, he says, “the cover of TIME can become another museum.”
