Refik Anadol

Refik Anadol is a media artist and a pioneer in creative machine intelligence. Born in Turkey in 1985, he now lives and works in Los Angeles.

The multicultural nature of Anadol's team is central to his practice, with members from 10 different countries collectively fluent in 14 languages. From the outset, he prioritized sourcing experts in neuroscience, architecture, music, and data science over traditional art-world figures, fostering a unique collaborative environment for his work. Anadol’s projects—ranging from site-specific public art to live audiovisual performances—are deeply human-centric, exploring emotions and the interplay between people and their environments. His overarching question: What does it mean to be human in the 21st century?

Architecture and imagination are pivotal in Anadol’s work. He transforms architectural spaces into canvases, enabling buildings to "dream" and "hallucinate." His fascination with imagination began at the age of eight when his mother brought home a VHS of Blade Runner. The film’s dystopian portrayal of Los Angeles ignited his creativity and became a lasting inspiration, particularly the moment when Rachael discovers her memories are artificial. This prompted Anadol to ask: What can a machine do with someone else’s memories? Like social media, which becomes more intelligent with interaction, could machines learn, process memories, and even dream?

In 2016, Anadol coined the term "AI Data Painting" to describe his process of using data as pigment and artificial intelligence as a "thinking brush." This concept drives his exploration into the poetics of data, dissolving physical boundaries and merging virtual and physical worlds. His innovative use of tools like VVV, a JavaScript-based coding language, enables projection mapping and live programming to regenerate iconic structures with AI creativity.

Anadol’s work challenges humanity’s relationship with computing and AI, which he views as still in its embryonic stages. Swirling masses of digitized pigment, kinetic forms, and vivid storytelling define his aesthetic. His art invites audiences into alternate realities, offering transformative dialogues between architecture and media art.

If a space telescope were able to hallucinate landscapes of a planet after collecting 12 TB of visual memories of Mars, what would those hallucinations look like? Refik Anadol’s Mars Dreams is a series of multi-dimensional AI data paintings and sculptures that emerge from the artist’s ongoing research into this complex question at the intersection of art, technology, and artificial intelligence. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) telescope’s high-resolution capability (imaging up to 30 centimeters per pixel) remains unprecedented for any existing orbiter in the study of the planet for the advancement of robotic and future human exploration. Anadol’s five-year-long investigations of the latent space of MRO’s journeys to Mars was motivated by his motto of “making the invisible visible,” and began with a raw dataset of more than a million photographs captured by the machine. In order to process such vast data, a custom Style GAN algorithm was created and programmed to “dream” synthetic landscapes of the Martian surface, triggering our imagination about a place that is not yet familiar but we continually set out to explore and understand.