The Dubai Museum of the Future hosts its 2024 Forum, bringing together global thought leaders to explore transformative futures for generations. Focusing on health, longevity, and planetary well-being, the event will unpack UN Summit outcomes and illuminate pathways for youth empowerment. Refik Anadol will be delivering a Closing Fireside Chat at the Dubai Future Forum. Refik Anadol will be delivering a Closing Fireside Chat at Dubai Future Forum. [Registration Required]

The Monterey Design Conference (MDC), hosted by AIA California, is a biennial creative retreat that brings together globally recognized speakers. This immersive gathering features sessions led by dynamic thought leaders and practitioners to share their innovative projects, design philosophies, and cross-disciplinary approaches. [Tickets Required]

Miro Canvas '24 is the annual event for the Miro community, bringing together innovators, creators, and visionaries to celebrate the power of collaborative work. This year's event will feature inspiring speakers, exclusive first looks at new features, and opportunities to connect and collaborate with fellow Miro users. This is a virtual and in-person event filled with inspiration, connection, and exciting announcements.

On October 7, 2024, RAS will unveil a new artwork at AKBANK’s HQ in Sabancı Center, designed specifically for this venue. Using a comprehensive dataset and a custom-trained machine learning model, Anadol and his team created a visually and conceptually rich experience, merging AKBANK’s archives with nature data.

Refik Anadol Studio is thrilled to give back to the city that embraced their art practice. Anadol’s pursuit to express a new concept of AI-based art by creating digital pigments initiated his journey from Istanbul to Los Angeles, and in turn created the grounds for this artwork. In Artificial Realities: California Landscapes, Refik Anadol uses a thinking brush and paints with data to show how human-machine collaborations can help us experience nature in a new light. For this AI Data Sculpture, Refik Anadol Studio worked with a raw dataset of 153 million publicly available landscape images of California’s National Parks. This series of dynamic immersive landscapes offers an insight into Anadol’s decade-long AI-based art practice in LA through a California-focused thematic lens.

Large Nature Model: Coral is a data-driven artwork that explores the intersection of technology and nature. Developed by Refik Anadol Studio, the piece uses the world's first open-source generative AI model devoted to nature, the Large Nature Model (LNM), to immerse viewers in an abstract environment representing the beauty and fragility of global biodiversity, with a focus on coral reefs. Trained on a dataset of 100 million images, LNM serves as a bridge between scientific research, environmental advocacy, and artistic expression, highlighting the potential for AI to enhance our understanding and connection with the natural world. Large Nature Model: Coral emphasizes the responsible use of natural data, inviting viewers to reflect on the balance between human innovation and nature's vulnerability, and the role of technology in shaping a more sustainable future.

On September 4 at 7 p.m., the U.S. premiere of Refik Anadol’s Dvořák Dreams will showcase a groundbreaking fusion of art, music, and AI. This acclaimed series of AI Data Sculptures reimagines Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s works through a dynamic interplay of visual and sonic elements, drawing on a dataset of over 1.2 million images and sounds. Experience how Anadol's innovative use of AI brings a fresh perspective to Dvořák’s legacy, blending the physical and virtual to explore art’s deep connections with nature and technology.

PIP Seoul is the cornerstone event of Story House, bringing together industry leaders to discuss the transformative potential of programmable IP in the age of generative AI. Refik Anadol will be in a fireside chat with Carra Wu from a16z. [Registration Required]

Christie’s Art+Tech Summit is a two-day conference bringing together artists, technologists, academics, regulators and industry leaders, continuing Christie’s commitment to lead the dialogue about the role and impact of technologies in the art world.[Ticket Required]

Config is a yearly conference for designers and developers hosted by Figma, a web-based design platform. The event is a celebration of craft. [Registration Required]

For Art Basel in Basel 2024, Refik Anadol Studio unveils details of a new multidisciplinary project, Inner Portrait, in collaboration with Turkish Airlines. Marking a significant step in the studio’s ongoing exploration of “collecting” authentic human experiences, Inner Portrait merges AI aesthetics with neurobiology. The project features four first-time travelers embarking on journeys from Sydney to Cappadocia and Göbeklitepe, from Amazonia to Tokyo, from Iceland to Jordan, and Nairobi to Istanbul. Inner Portrait utilizes the latest AI tools to capture and convert the raw emotional data of these inaugural travel experiences into AI Data Paintings. The artworks themselves are crafted from biological and neurobiological data, such as heart rate, skin conductance, and EEG outputs, capturing participants’ real-time responses to new environments and cultures. Inner Portrait will be on display June 13-16 at Art Basel in Basel 2024.

Art Basel’s Second Digital day unites some of the leading thinkers in the space where tech meets art. Find out how art is reclaiming public spaces, how algorithms shape art collecting today, and how a new breed of institutions is placing cutting-edge art in the heart of the city. [RSVP Required]

As part of Art Basel Panel, "Healing Arts: Reimagining Healthcare" will explore current evidence and practice that underscores the profound potential of the arts to impact our health, positioning artists, gallerists, museum professionals, collectors and patrons as vital partners in our individual and collective wellbeing. [RSVP Required]

First-hand insights from a selected group of luminaries in the fields of crypto, art and psychedelics, Dialectic Summer Jam fosters a fertile ground for the cross-pollination of innovative ideas. [RSVP Required]

ART + SICENCE Talk with Refik Anadol, Turkish-American new media artist and Alistair Hudson, Scientific-Artistic Chairman of the ZKM | Karlsruhe. Moderated by JJ Charlesworth, art critic and editor at ArtReview. [RSVP Required]

At Google I/O 2024, Refik Anadol Studio presents Machine Hallucinations - LNM, an AI data sculpture created using The Large Nature Model (LNM), the world’s first generative AI model dedicated to nature. Developed by the Studio in collaboration with major research institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution, National Geographic, and London’s Natural history Museum, LNM utilizes an extensive, ethically sourced dataset of the natural world, pioneering a distinctive approach to digital environmentalism. The artwork displays simulated natural environments based on data of fauna, flora, fungi, corals, and landscapes and invites viewers to explore diverse ecosystems within a virtual manifestation of nature’s diversity.

Serpentine is hosting our studio’s largest institutional solo exhibition in the UK to date, “Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive,” from February 16th to April 7th, 2024. The exhibition showcases new and recent works, including early interactions from The Large Nature Model - the world’s first open-source generative AI model dedicated to nature, which we unveiled at the 2024 World Economic Forum. It presents a culmination of years of experimentation with the visual data of rainforests and coral reefs, creating generative environments that blur the lines between the digital and natural worlds.

Living Paintings: Nature is Refik Anadol Studio’s first solo exhibition in Rotterdam that provides a contemplative and transparent framework of the artist’s main inspirations, technical aspirations, and unique view of multi-sensory aesthetic experiences. In addition to showcasing AI Data Paintings and Sculptures based on millions of publicly available space and earth visuals collected by ISS and Hubble telescopes as well as 300 million photographs of flora and fauna, the exhibition also features a new rendering of Refik Anadol’s world-famous Infinity Room.

Realtime AI Data Sculpture By Refik Anadol Studio / Dataland

As part of Kanazawa 21st Century Museum’s exhibition titled Digital Transformation Planet: Towards the Next Interface, Refik Anadol Studio exhibits six AI Data Sculptures that emerge from the Studio’s long term research on the intersection of neuroscience, machine learning, and aesthetics. The selection is carefully curated by Anadol to reflect on his interest in unveiling intricate layers of newly discovered relationships between human memory and artificial intelligence from the perspective of multisensory and immersive arts.

Las Vegas’ newest spectacular arts and entertainment venue The Sphere will host Refik Anadol on its facade as one of its inaugural experiences. Machine Hallucinations: The Sphere is an immersive experience that simulates the rhythms of various urban and nature environments around Las Vegas by using humanities’ collective memories of space, urban architecture, and nature.

The newest iteration of our Studio’s Virtual Depictions AI Data Sculpture series will open in Sydney on April 28, 2023. Through architectural transformations of a media wall into a spectacular public event, the artwork is based on a nature-themed dataset of publicly available coral images.

What would a machine dream about after seeing the collection of The Museum of Modern Art? For Unsupervised, artist Refik Anadol (b. 1985) uses artificial intelligence to interpret and transform more than 200 years of art at MoMA. Known for his groundbreaking media works and public installations, Anadol has created digital artworks that unfold in real time, continuously generating new and otherworldly forms that envelop viewers in a large-scale installation. Unsupervised is a meditation on technology, creativity, and modern art. Anadol trained a sophisticated machine-learning model to interpret the publicly available data of MoMA’s collection. As the model “walks” through its conception of this vast range of works, it reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been—and what might be to come. In turn, Anadol incorporates site-specific input from the environment of the Museum’s Gund Lobby—changes in light, movement, acoustics, and the weather outside—to affect the continuously shifting imagery and sound. AI is often used to classify, process, and generate realistic representations of the world. In contrast, Unsupervised is visionary: it explores fantasy, hallucination, and irrationality, creating an alternate understanding of art-making itself. The installation is based on works that are encoded on the blockchain, a distributed digital ledger, which stands as a public record of Anadol’s art. “I am trying to find ways to connect memories with the future,” the artist has said, “and to make the invisible visible.” Organized by Michelle Kuo, The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, and Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design and Director of Research and Development, with Lydia Mullin, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.

Machine Hallucinations: Renaissance Dreams, a pioneering AI Data Sculpture based on an art historical dataset previously exhibited at Palazzo Strozzi, is now on view at the Virgin Mary Church, Cappadocia, Turkey. For this project, we trained our AI with all the visual artworks created between 1300-1700.

From September 26th—October 8th, Dior will host our J’Adore AI Data Sculpture as part of the Exhibition L’Or de J’adore, an event that invites visitors to discover the new interpretation of Dior’s iconic fragrance by Francis Kurkdjian. Perpetuating the links that bring together the House of Dior and artists from all around the world, Refik Anadol began meeting with Kurkdjian a few months ago. This amazing long-term collaboration resulted in a hypnotic artwork based on a dataset that compiles the fragrance's floral composition formulas, displaying dynamic, liquid gold patterns imagined by artificial intelligence.

We are excited to reveal Machine Simulations : Life and Dreams (Hui No Ae Rak), our studio’s latest permanent artwork in Seoul, Korea, commissioned by Hanwha LIFEPLUS. The artwork is a 16-minute AI Data Sculpture that features dynamic visualizations of vast datasets compiling visual and audio data points from multiple sources, including publicly available firework images, a K-Pop dance video database, datasets of brain activities collected with EEG sensors, and Korean classical music audio files. Machine Simulations : Life and Dreams incorporates vivid pigments, shapes, and patterns, aiming to create a collective and meditative experience that stimulates interrelated emotions, alluding to the unique cultural concept (Hui No Ae Rak) 喜怒哀樂.

Presented in front of the historic Rudolfinum in Prague as part of the annual classical music festival Dvořák Prague, Dvořák Dreams is a series of AI Data Sculptures at the intersection of arts, AI, technology, and boundless creativity, commemorating the legendary Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s (1841-1904) works and the environments that nourished his genius.

A series of our nature-themed AI Data Sculptures will be on display at Moco Museum of Barcelona until September 5th under the title The Nature Series. Comprising three of our signature works based on millions of publicly available images of and from the earth - Perennial Pigmentations, Satellite Dreams, and Floral Pigmentations - the series challenges our perception of nature and technology by blurring the lines between physical and digital worlds.

From February to August 2023, Refik Anadol Studio’s Nature Dreams series will fill ARKEN Museums’s largest exhibition space, the Art Axis, in Denmark. In the exhibition titled Refik Anadol – Nature Dreams we will present three nature-themed artworks, one of them created especially for this exhibition. The exhibition’s highlight is Winds of Denmark (2023), a new artwork based on meteorological data collected from the museum’s unique location in Ishøj Beach Park.

Refik Anadol Studio’s latest AI-based immersive data narrative for Mumbai JIO World Center, Mumbai Dreams, reveals a spectacular series of synesthetic reality experiments that highlight the beauty of the city. It features dynamic visualizations of vast datasets containing visual imageries of Mumbai’s natural and urban fabric, harnessing approximately 1.5 million publicly available architectural, urban, and nature-themed Mumbai images.

We are honored to be part of Ipotesi Metaverso, a multisensory art exhibition at the Palazzo Cipolla in Rome with our Nature Series this year. The exhibition transforms the Palazzo with site-specific digital works by more than 30 artists from around the world.

Refik Anadol Studio premièred the immersive AI art installation Unseen Intelligence in a global three-day event in Tokyo, in collaboration with Clé de Peau Beauté to celebrate and represent their revolutionary skincare research. The work is based on a unique analogy between skin intelligence and artificial intelligence from the perspective of “making the invisible visible.” It uses publicly available weather data including indices and levels of UV and pollution – both of which are external aggressors known to cause skin damage. Training multiple GAN algorithms, the studio reconstructed this dataset into beautiful light refractions and radiance

Refik Anadol Studio’s most recent nature-focused project and artwork, Glacier Dreams, will lighten up the facade of ArtScience Museum in Singapore as part of the i Light Singapore, co-presented by Julius Baer and Marina Bay Sands

Refik Anadol will be at Art Basel on June 12 and 13 for the immersive projection of Glacier Dreams at Theater Basel at this year’s Art Basel in Switzerland. Commissioned by Julius Baer, Glacier Dreams is an ongoing research and art project for which Anadol processes a dataset of visual materials that he personally collects by traveling to world’s glaciers, starting with Iceland.

Several artworks from Refik Anadol Studio’s most comprehensive AI-based art research project to date, Machine Hallucinations, will be on display at the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf this spring. The exhibition will include Satellite Simulations on a 4m x 6m LED wall, an AI Data Painting utilizing over 2 million images that were captured and recorded by the ISS, Hubble, and MRO telescopes and other sensors and satellites – the largest space-related dataset ever used to train a generative adversarial network (GAN) for an artwork.

The iconic facade of Gaudi’s Casa Batlló will light up again with Refik Anadol Studio’s multisensory art projection on May 5th, to be experienced in five sessions at 21:30, 22:00, 22:30. 23:00 and 23:30. Last year’s installation gathered more than 47,000 people on site, transforming the façade of Casa Batlló into an extraordinary dialogue between AI, architecture, music, and media art. The event is free and produced in collaboration with the Fundació Barcelona Promoció.

Living Paintings, Refik Anadol’s first major solo exhibition in Los Angeles, opened at Jeffrey Deitch on February 14, 2023. The exhibition showcases the complete series of Anadol’s major artworks, including his latest AI Data Paintings that are based on California-related datasets. Merging collective memories of urban life and nature with groundbreaking machine learning and visualization technologies, Living Paintings invites a poetic and futuristic contemplation of purposeful human-machine collaborations.

Refik Anadol Studio unveiled Glacier Dreams at Art Dubai from 1 to 5 March 2023. Commissioned by Swiss Wealth Manager Julius Baer, Glacier Dreams is a groundbreaking new project inspired by the beauty and fragility of the world’s glaciers. In creating this immersive audio-visual installation with an olfactory component, Refik Anadol will utilize glacier visuals from online and institutional archives along with those he personally-collected. With this artwork, RAS is hoping to not only generate poetic experiences but to also use our existing AI tools to contribute to glacier research and raise awareness about climate change and rising sea levels.

Refik Anadol Studio will participate in Art Maebashi’s group exhibition specially designed for their 10th year anniversary: New Horizon: Vision of the Future. The exhibition brings together artists who are not afraid to push boundaries from around the world and Anadol’s participation will highlight the artist’s most recent conceptualization of “Artificial Realities” on a LED screen featuring AI-assisted artistic simulations of nature.

Refik Anadol Studio’s first major project in 2023 was Artificial Realities: Coral, which was commissioned by the World Economic Forum in Davos. This site-specific Data Sculpture on display at the WEF 2023 was inspired by the ocean environment and the plight of the coral reefs. The project uses approximately 100 million coral images as raw data and aims to use the potential of both Metaverse and blockchain economies to raise awareness about global climate change.

In Search of the Present is a recurring exhibition concept at EMMA that was first presented in 2016. The exhibitions in the series explore the nature of the present and anticipate future developments through an intuitive artistic process. The show borrows its title from a collection of essays by author Olavi Paavolainen from 1929 in which he explores the experience and identity of humanity in an era of rapid change. The exhibition in autumn 2022 will focus on the relationship between humanity, nature and technology. One of the issues explored by the featured artists is whether technology can help us not only achieve a greater understanding of ourselves but also forge a new non-exploitative relationship with nature. Artists are exceptionally gifted in thinking outside the box, which makes it particularly interesting to turn to them in our search for new ways to see humanity and navigate the challenges of today, such as the climate crisis and algorithmic systems.

Alkazar Dreams — AI Cinema created by using 150 historic Turkish movies / memories of 100 years old theater in İstanbul! 20 channel projectors + 18 channel sound + realtime tracking system with custom software.

The Reel Store's opening exhibition is the UK premiere of Refik Anadol's Machine Memoirs: Space. The product of a long-term collaboration with NASA, the exhibition uses artificial intelligence to reimagine two million publicly available images taken by satellite and telescopes, transporting visitors from the centre of Coventry to the deepest regions of outer space. Machine Memoirs: Space is a 360 degree experience, suitable for the whole family, with a futuristic, awe-inspiring display that captures the beauty and spectacle of space in waves of colour and light. Whether you have an interest in space, are looking to have fun with the family, or want to grab the most instagrammable pictures in Coventry, this is an exhibition not to be missed. Suitable for all ages.

Friends in NYC, you can experiment with our new installations at The Shed for @byUnfinished till 24th. This piece a new public art experiment for collecting our collective dreams for future Project Liberty steps! Realtime #stablediffusion for public art! Open and free for public.

From the team at Zaha Hadid Architects in London: “‘Architecting the Metaverse’ is an immersive art project at the intersection of architecture, art, technology, and artificial intelligence. “It is the result of a six-month collaboration with Refik Anadol Studio and was created as part of the ‘Meta-Horizons: The Future Now’ exhibition at the DDP Design Museum in Seoul, South Korea.” Refik Anadol: “We visualized and experimented with ZHA’s incredible database of architectural documentation by using the most recent multi-model AI algorithms.”

Zorlu PSM celebrates its 10th anniversary with an unforgettable performance by Fazıl Say and Jamal Aliyev! Fazıl Say's "Hayat Ağacı" world premiere will be at Zorlu PSM Turkcell Stage on September 16... World-renowned pianist and composer Fazıl Say will meet the audience with a magnificent concert on September 16 at Zorlu PSM. At the concert, the world premiere of Hayat Ağacı Suite, composed by the artist for cello and piano in 2021 upon the order of Zorlu PSM, will take place. Jamal Aliyev, one of the young talents of the cello, will accompany Fazıl Say on this special night. In addition to the first performance of "Hayat Ağacı", Say's "Dört Şehir" sonata and C. Franck's cello and piano sonata are among the other works to be listened to with their magnificent interpretations. Values ​​and people that have a strong meaning in the existence of the artist; "Hayat Ağacı", that tells about his growth and rooting in his life, memories and intellectual world with unique melodies, is also Fazıl Say's hundredth work. In this sense, the production refers to the past and the future, rooted and powerful symbol of time, that does not give up hope even for a single moment. The chapter titles of the work also have special names that strengthen the theme of the production; "Umut", "Babam Ahmet Say", "Ece", "Annem anısına" ve "Hayat Ağacı"...

Shared our studio’s journey and explained the impact of experiential NFTs in public space!

We obtained all of the data used in the exhibition from publicly available sources – that is, every data set behind the works can be found on the internet. The process began with a regular review of NASA archives. Afterwards, we analyzed and classified the collection of visual data conceptually with the help of machine intelligence and taught the visual memories of each machine to artificial intelligence with the GAN algorithm named StyleGAN2ADA. We were able to create poetic, immersive experiences by combining fluid dynamics algorithms, which we have been using with great enthusiasm in our works for years. Kerim Karaoğlu designed the audio experience in the exhibition also using the same data.

An artist fascinated by memory and the creative potential of machines, Refik Anadol makes data his preferred material and artificial intelligence his principal collaborator. In his artistic practice, he surrounds himself with a team of multidisciplinary artists and researchers to create proteiform installations – 3D sculptures, moving and abstract data frescoes, audiovisual performances. Refik Anadol’s offering for the Centre Pompidou-Metz is the result of the artist’s long-term research projects at the intersection of architecture, environmental data, the aesthetics of probability, and Google’s and NASA’s experiments with artificial intelligence (Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab and AI Quantum Supremacy programmes). This spectacular work is a data sculpture made from over two hundred million publicly available nature-related images that will be displayed on a digital canvas of 10m x 10m, forming a constantly moving 100m2 image. This set of data is processed using a personalised program developed by the Refik Anadol Studio in collaboration with Google AI’s quantum research team, which employs new methods of using data. Thus, artificial intelligence speculates on other appearances of images of nature, within one of the world’s most sophisticated computers, capable of directly using the laws of quantum physics when performing its calculations and thereby generating quantum noise.

Refik Anadol is honored to create a poetic, immersive, and multisensory artwork to commemorate the 750th death anniversary of one of the greatest poets and philosophers in human history. Inspired by Rumi’s multilayered philosophical lens through which he interpreted life and the universe, Rumi Dreams is an AI-based spectacle of light and motion that animates a vast dataset of precious Rumi archives. This dataset, collected with the generous help of Konya Metropolitan Municipality, includes scripts of Masnavi in 19 different languages, more than 180,000 images of dervish lodges, ancient book pages, and documents, and recordings of Sufi music and performances. Anadol and his team process this interdisciplinary dataset that is emblematic of Rumi’s worldview though machine learning algorithms. The resulting data universe becomes the building blocks of machine-generated Rumi Dreams, a unique perspective from which to view Rumi’s poetic universe on an unprecedented scale. Generating a multisensory dynamic performance, Rumi Dreams is a mesmerizing artistic expression of the convergence between the meaning(s) of light, knowledge, and movement, encouraging you to find “your light that lights the world.” “Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.” Rumi

Contemporary art center Palazzo Strozzi opens "Let’s Get Digital!," one of the first and most significant shows in Italy to focus on digital art, May 17, 2022.

Living Architecture: Casa Batlló” will be one of the first NFT of it’s kind that truly connects physical and virtual worlds! For example; currently weather is rainy in Barcelona; dynamic NFT art work will reflect the nature back to itself autonomously as seen in the video!

Data from three different space missions were systematically collected – from ISS, Hubble and MRO telescopes – and analyzed with the help of comprehensive artificial intelligence algorithms. In this part of the exhibition, called the Data Tunnel, the audience is greeted with visuals of the raw data and a look into the analysis processes through which they are transformed into pigments, paintings, and sculptures. These visuals and narratives, which oscillate between abstract and concrete data, simulate the scientific research process behind the exhibition as well as the idea of “being surrounded by data,” one of the main themes of the artistic representation of the Studio’s research.

This groundbreaking immersive exhibition, in collaboration with award-winning media artist and pioneer in the aesthetics of machine intelligence, Refik Anadol, returns to ARTECHOUSE NYC, now with an opportunity to collect immersive experiential NFTs. Commissioned by ARTECHOUSE and created by Refik Anadol, Machine Hallucination: NYC is a time and space exploration into New York City’s past and potential future. This completely immersive exhibition is of New York, by New York and for New York — a fitting tribute to one of the world’s greatest cities and architectural marvels. Exploring New York through the mind of a machine, Machine Hallucination: NYC aims to uncover the ever-changing shape of the city, evoking our collective memory and the ways that new forms of visual representation can alter our perception of this iconic destination. In partnership with Nifty Gateway, this special viewing of Machine Hallucination: NYC, which attracted over 100,000 visitors in its first showing, will also feature an exclusive location drop of exhibition-based experiential NFT art, a collection composed of 1,000 unique NFTs from Anadol available to visitors on-site only at ARTECHOUSE’s New York location.

Commissioned by the NGV, Quantum memories 2020 is Refik Anadol’s most technically and conceptually ambitious work to date. The work explores the opportunities presented by artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and quantum computing to visualise an everchanging large-scale immersive multimedia artwork. Harnessing a dataset drawn from over two hundred million images linked to nature from publicly available internet resources and processed using quantum computing with machine learning algorithms, Anadol’s work uses the data to speculate an alternate dimension of the natural world as a complex cultural entity with memory. The first true quantum artwork created, Anadol’s arresting visuals and accompanying audio are composed in collaboration with a generative algorithm enabled by AI. In taking the data that flows around us as his primary material and the neural network of a quantum mind as his collaborator, Anadol paints with a thinking brush offering us radical visualisations of our digitised memories of the natural realm. By representing the complexity of our collective memory in the largest digital artwork staged by the NGV, the artist encourages us to imagine the beginning of a quantum computerised mind and its immense potential for the future of art and design.

Refik Anadol’s Latent History takes the viewer on a journey through a beautiful, yet thought-provoking work projected on a 55 metre-wide by 3.5 metre-high screen in Fotografiska’s large exhibition hall. It’s a never-before-seen portrayal of Stockholm, as envisioned by machines, using algorithms revealing the hidden history found in archives and old photographs stretching back 150 years. Imagine taking abstract data streams and turning them into a reality. By collecting a huge amount of digital information from different data sources, interpreting them artistically, and then giving them a life, one could present alternative histories that never actually happened. This is life for Refik Anadol. Born in 1985 in Istanbul, Turkey, this multiple award-winning artist, designer and director works with location-specific, digital visual artworks based on datasets, data stream collections and interpretation.

Infinity’ is an immersive environment project by Refik Anadol. Project is an integral part of artist’s ongoing ‘Temporary Immersive Environment Experiments’ which is a research on audio/visual installations by using the state called immersion which is the state of consciousness where an immersant’s awareness of physical self is transformed by being surrounded in an engrossing environment; often artificial, creating a perception of presence in a non-physical world. In this project ‘infinity’ chosen as a concept,a radical effort to deconstruct the framework of this illusory space and transgress the normal boundaries of the viewing experience to set out to transform the conventional flat cinema projection screen into a three dimensional kinetic and architectonic space of visualisation by using contemporary algorithms. Light is the major element in the experiment, used to blur and interconnect the boundaries between the two realms actual/fictional and physical/virtual. It signifies the threshold between the simulacrum space created by the projection technology, and the physical space where the viewer stands. The experiments will discuss the inherent spatial qualities of immersive virtual environments and their effect on the embodied person. Through the presented framework, the experiments intends to question the relativity of perception and how it informs the apprehension of our surroundings. Rather than approaching the medium as a means of escape into some disembodied techno-utopian fantasy, projects sees itself as a means of return, i.e. facilitating a temporary release from our habitual perceptions and culturally biased assumptions about being in the world, to enable us, however momentarily, to perceive ourselves and the world around us freshly.

Virtual Archive (2017) is an installation of a 3D, computer-generated environment that is open to interactive explorations by single-users. Via a virtual reality headset, the user flies through a 3D data point cloud formed by a t-SNE machine learning algorithm, visualizing more than 1,700,000 documents present in SALT Research archive collections. Refik Anadol’s installation is displayed as an extension to the artist’s Archive Dreaming, also commissioned by SALT in 2017. Devised during Anadol’s residency at Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence, Virtual Archive is a proposal for research possibilities in the immediate future. The user first reaches a data tunnel, which slowly transforms into a navigable 3D t-SNE data cloud. When the cloud settles into a 2D library of archival documents, the user can later move from one object to another and select content for close-up studies as if they were available in a physical environment. Following its initial presentation as part of The Uses of Art: Final Exhibition at SALT Galata, Archive Dreaming was exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival 2017 under the theme “Artificial Intelligence” last September. Employing machine learning algorithms to search and sort relations among objects in SALT Research archive collections, this user-driven installation enabled new perspectives on the content, and challenged static concepts of the archive; when idle it “dreamed” of unexpected correlations among documents.

Commissioned to work with SALT Research collections, artist Refik Anadol 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 with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union, is user-driven; however, when idle, the installation “dreams” of unexpected correlations among documents. The resulting high-dimensional data and interactions are translated into an architectural immersive space. Shortly after receiving the commission, Anadol was a resident artist for Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence Program where he closely collaborated with Mike Tyka and explored 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. In this project, a temporary immersive architectural space is created as a canvas with light and data applied as materials. This radical effort to deconstruct the framework of an illusory space will transgress the normal boundaries of the viewing experience of a library and the conventional flat cinema projection screen, into a three dimensional kinetic and architectonic space of an archive visualized with machine learning algorithms. By training a neural network with images of 1,700,000 documents at SALT Research the main idea is to create an immersive installation with architectural intelligence to reframe memory, history and culture in museum perception for 21st century through the lens of machine intelligence. SALT is grateful to Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence program, and Doğuş Technology, ŠKODA, Volkswagen Doğuş Finansman for supporting Archive Dreaming.