ABOUT REFIK ANADOL STUDIO

Virtual Depictions: San Francisco is a public art project consisting of a series of parametric data sculptures displayed on a 40’x 80′ LED wall. Utilizing publicly available datasets – from transportation to city management, museum data and housing, Virtual Depictions tells the story of the city and the people living in it.

Location: San Francisco, United States

Date: September 30th, 2015 (installation date of the permanent piece)

Project Partners: Arup, Sensory Interactive, Sansi North America, Skidmore, Owingsand Merrill LLP (SOM), Webcor Builders, WSP | Parsons, and Brinckerhoff

Interconnected is a digital artwork that portrays the hidden troves of operational data at Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT) as an ever-changing suite of abstract form, color, and simulated texture. The data feeds that drive the artwork include global and regional air-traffic tracking software, airline flight information (arrivals/departures), baggage handling systems, and parking and ground shuttle transportation throughout the airport campus.

Location: Charlotte, North Carolina, United States

Date: July 2018

Project Partners: Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT)

WDCH Dreams, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic to celebrate their Centennial, explores the orchestra’s 100-year history, and visualizes their future. Anadol and his team developed a unique machine intelligence approach to apply to the entire LA Phil digital archive — 45 terabytes of data. The results were stunning visualizations in two forms, a week-long public art installation projected onto the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall’s undulating exterior, and a season-long immersive exhibition inside WDCH at the Ira Gershwin Gallery.

Location: Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, USA

Date: September 27th – October 6th, 2018

Project Partners: LA Phil, Google Arts & Culture: Artist and Machine Intelligence Program

For Seoul Haemong, Refik Anadol Studio collaborated with the DDP and city of Seoul to create a public art installation that showcased this otherwise uncontainable soul.

Using the DDP as a canvas, the performance collaborated with the mind of a machine to unearth the materiality of this structure and explore the architecture of memory itself. Upon unveiling DDP’s form, the building set the stage for the exploration of – new kind of topographic memory, revealing upon its face the city’s collective histories. Choreographing thi piece began by collecting data from the city in the form of the citizens’ stories. These stories come in the form of archival and personal photographs and documents individual and communal narratives that offer a window into the past and hopes for the future. Using the machine mind to see the connections between these intimate visual memories, the performance transported viewers from a limited sense of place into a multi-dimensional spatial journey that visualized an otherwise intangible understanding of space and time..
Location: DDP, Seoul, Korea

Date: December 20th 2019 January 3, 2020

Project Partners: DDP, City of Seoul

Melting Memories is a series of digital artworks that explore the materiality of remembering They offer new insights into the representational possibilities emerging from the intersection of advanced technology and contemporary art. Comprised of data paintings, augmented data sculptures, and light projections, the project as a whole debuts new advances in technology that enable visitors to experience aesthetic interpretations of EEG data collected on the neural mechanisms of cognitive control.

Location: Istanbul, Turkey

Date: February 7th – March 17th, 2018

Project Partners: Pilevneli Gallery, UCSF/ Neuroscape Lab Members, and Adam Gazzaley, M.D., Ph.D.

How to perceive or imagine infinity has always been one of the central questions of representation in art. Our lives are framed by a sense of finitude: the sense that everything that we perceive will cease to exist one day. But if finitude is the only absolute truth in life, how can we imagine structures and patterns that repeat themselves into an imperceivable horizon? How do we frame imagined realities that represent something beyond our perception of life and of linear time?

One of the greatest eighteenth-century English artists William Blake famously said, “if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is — infinite.” Infinite Space is a collection of works that revisits Blake’s statement, and seeks to cleanse the doors of perception with the tools available to twenty-first-century artists. The exhibition explores memories and dreams through the mind of a machine by using data sets ranging from human memories, photographs of Mars, cultural archives and sea surface activity as data sculptures and paintings.

Location: Artechouse – Washington, DC United States

Date: March 24th, 2019 – August 18th, 2019

Machine Hallucinations is a 30-minute experimental cinema, presented in 16K resolution, that visualizes the story of New York through the city’s collective memories that constitute its deeply-hidden consciousness. The exhibition does not tell the story of today’s New York, but, instead, foresees what may come, through the machine intelligence’s bridging of the gap between the present and a vision of the near future. It is a hopeful vision about the evolving relationship between machine and man, and provides an alternative to the conventional narrative of an apocalyptic future. Machine Hallucination offers a unique context for us to explore an alternative reality. As both an entertaining and enthralling experience, the machine’s hallucination can expand our capacity to dream, and help us envision things that we otherwise could not see or imagine.

Location: Artechouse – New York City, New York, United States

Date: September 4th, 2019 – February 5th, 2020

Latent Being is a meditation on the convergence of AI, urban history, and collective memory. Composed of four chapters, Anadol’s installation turns the space into a temporary ecosystem. The city, the architecture and the visitors all become players in the performance. The audience find themselves walking through a dynamic ocean of Berlin-related digital visual and sonic memories, and light and fog sculptures —abstract representations of the machine’s neural networks. The machine learns about the elements that make up the building’s physical form, not just its structure, but also the life inside it; visitors are observed, and become physically connected to the artificial thinking process. Eventually, the constant data input — representations of movement, social interactions and space — gets transformed into a hallucinogenic large-scale LED screen painting.

Location: Kraftwerk, Berlin, Germany

Date: November 23, 2019 – May 1, 2020

Commissioned to work with SALT Research collections, Refik Anadol Studio employed machine learning algorithms to search and sort relations among 1,700,000 documents. Interactions of the multidimensional data found in the archives are, in turn, translated into an immersive media installation. Archive Dreaming, which is presented as part of The Uses of Art: Final Exhibition, is user-driven; however, when idle, the installation “dreams” of unexpected correlations among documents.

Shortly after receiving the commission, Anadol was a resident artist for Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence using supercomputers and cutting-edge developments in the field of machine intelligence in an environment that brings together artists and engineers. Developed during this residency, his intervention Archive Dreaming transforms the gallery space on floor -1 at SALT Galata into an all-encompassing environment that intertwines history with the contemporary, and challenges immutable concepts of the archive, while destabilizing archive-related questions with machine learning algorithms.

Location: SALT Research, Istanbul, Turkey

Date: April 20th, 2017 – June11th, 2017

Through the lens of technologies produced by Intel, City of the Future understands data in this context as both a way to better comprehend an existing archetype, as well as imagine its possible future iterations. By lateraling four distinct data paintings driven by the four respective Intel data sets within the context of a near-future cityscape, we are able to explore the interwoven power of these technologies to profoundly affect the human experience. At the micro leve, data from groups such as autonomous vehicles can tell us more about traffic patterns, while at the macro level, data from technologies related to 5G may offer a view into the omnipresent, but invisible flowers of information that exist. Investigated separately, and ultimately together, through the mind of the machine, City of the Future offers another vantage point to appreicate those connections which make up our sense of place.

Location: Las Vegas, Nevada, United States

Date: January 4th, 2020 – January 9th, 2020