This year’s TIME cover was created by artist Refik Anadol, who is also featured on the TIME100 AI list. Anadol trained his studio’s AI using TIME’s archive of over 5,000 covers from the past century. The resulting abstract artwork, with Anadol’s signature flowing, molecular style, depicts the AI’s “dream” of TIME’s visual history, according to Anadol.
Anadol and his team developed a modular multimodal AI system, the “Archive Dream,” through extensive research and collaboration. Anadol’s studio states that the model was trained on a large, ethically sourced dataset of the natural world, incorporating over half a billion images from organizations like the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution, and London’s Natural History Museum, along with data from 16 rainforests. Anadol, whose work has been shown at MoMA in New York, London’s Serpentine Galleries, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, collaborated with tech companies Nvidia and Google Cloud, which provided computing resources. Models like Meta’s Llama and Google’s Gemini also play roles in the system.
The AI model analyzed each TIME cover, extracting thematic and historical data, which was then used as a prompt. Anadol explained that they operated the system in two modes: “future cover” and “archive dream.” The first mode aimed to use “the patterns of the past hundred years to generate pathways to hopeful futures,” envisioning hypothetical covers featuring future heroes who might use AI to solve historical problems. Some covers featured people in jobs that don’t yet exist, such as a “symbiotic architect” or a “chief memory curator.” Anadol asks, “Can we use AI to dream new jobs? Can we use AI to find solutions to problems we created?”
While these imagined futures influenced the project’s concept, the final cover was created using the “archive dream” mode, representing a synthesis of TIME’s archive filtered through Anadol’s artistic vision. The core image was AI-generated, while details like the text, gallery context, and Anadol’s silhouette were human-directed, creating a “true human-machine collaboration,” he says. The cover can be viewed as a looping video online.
Although the work is reminiscent of his 2022 exhibit, “Unsupervised,” at MoMA, which attracted nearly three million visitors, Anadol states that the conceptual and technical foundations of each project are different, representing different approaches to machine-driven creativity. The goal for MoMA was for the system to develop its own aesthetic logic. For TIME, Anadol wanted his naturalist system to respond to human history. “Ultimately, this project is an invitation. The future is not a fixed destination to be afraid of, but a fluid reality we can actually shape,” he says.
In 2023, “Unsupervised” became the first artwork tokenized on blockchain to be added to MoMA’s permanent collection. Anadol views his feature on TIME’s cover—an “iconic canvas”—as another significant moment, suggesting that “the TIME cover can be another museum.”
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