Artificial Realities: Coral presents Refik Anadol Studio’s ultimate visualization of years-long research on compiling a comprehensive dataset of coral images with the aim of raising awareness about climate change through art. This site-specific Data Sculpture on display at the World Economic Forum 2023 is inspired by the ocean environment and the plight of the coral reefs and uses approximately 100 million coral images as raw data. Combining science, technology, and visual arts, the artwork emphasizes the preservation and sustainability of corals. It connects a digital ecosystem of data and a landscape that is home to many living ecosystems with the aim of using the potential of both Metaverse and blockchain economies to alleviate global climate change issues. The main goal of this multi-disciplinary project is to become able to utilize groundbreaking data visualization and machine learning methods to create 3D printed AI Data Sculptures for the underwater universe that perfectly resemble corals found in nature and help restore ecosystems in the oceans.

As a media artist exploring how the perception and experience of space is radically changing now that machines dominate our everyday lives, Refik Anadol is intrigued by the ways in which the digital age and machine intelligence allow for a new aesthetic technique to create enriched immersive and dynamic environments. He tackles this by moving beyond the integration of media into built forms and translating the logic of a new media technology into art and design. His works explore the space among digital and physical entities by creating a hybrid relationship between science and media arts with machine intelligence. This monumental artwork for the WEF 2023 combines physical architecture and embodied experience in the real world while insisting upon a hybridity with our digital realm. With this work, Anadol hopes to bring attention to an urgent environmental reality by creating an artificial ocean environment: the impact of climate change on coral die-offs. A masterfully curated multi-channel experience, Artificial Realities: Coral invites the audience to be immersed in a virtual underwater space while physically surrounded by talks and seminars about how to create a better world.

The artwork consists of several chapters that culminate in a mesmerizing experimentation with the Stable Diffusion model – one of the most groundbreaking technologies of artificial intelligence in image production. In the first part, using StyleGAN2 ADA to capture the machine’s “hallucinations” of coral images and colors in a multi-dimensional space, Refik Anadol Studio trained a unique AI model with subsets of the collected coral archive. Each image in the series displays a cluster of chosen “hallucinations,” and Anadol makes selections from countless serendipitous allusions to coral images occurring in “the machine-mind.” After the training, when idle and unsupervised, the AI generates abstracted coral images, constructing new aesthetic visuals and color combinations based on the dataset and through unique lines drawn by algorithmic connections. In the second part, The Stable Diffusion model attempts to create images from verbal descriptions of coral by transforming an image of pure noise into a realistic coral visual. This AI model is trained with approximately 5 billion photos and RAS fine-tuned the model with the coral images they collected to have desired solutions. Anadol’s team then used ESRGAN super upscaling techniques to reach 6k resolutions.

Displayed on two LED screens of 12M x 4M and 6M x 4M for the coral-themed data narratives and the processing videos respectively, the resulting artwork simulates a latent walk among the vast archive of coral images, manifesting Anadol’s vision of handling data within a universe that it creates for itself and his approach to data visualization’s latent space as a locus for never-ending, self-generating contemplation. It demonstrates that when harmonious collaboration exists between machine, man and nature, the result can be poetic and beautiful, and, hopefully, inspire change.