Inner Portrait is an ambitious multidisciplinary collaboration between Turkish Airlines and world-renowned media artist and director Refik Anadol, blending art and technology on a global scale. This groundbreaking initiative utilizes the latest AI tools to capture and convert the raw emotional data of first-time travelers’ experiences into AI Data Paintings. Each piece vividly illustrates the unseen emotional journeys navigated during their travels, from Sydney to Cappadocia and Göbeklitepe, from Amazonia to Tokyo, from Iceland to Jordan, and Nairobi to Istanbul.

Taking the correspondence between experiences and neuronal activity as its starting point, the project encapsulates a special journey into Anadol’s innovative approach to “collecting” authentic human experiences, merging AI aesthetics with neurobiology. As Turkish Airlines bridges cultures, Anadol places the artwork at the intersection of art, culture, and technology.

The artwork, a series of dynamic AI Data Paintings, is crafted from the biological and neurobiological data—like heart rate, skin conductance, and EEG outputs—of travelers experiencing a new geography and culture for the first time. This data, collected during their journeys, is processed by machine learning algorithms developed at Refik Anadol Studio.

The data collection begins in each participant’s home, using advanced monitoring devices such as the Neuroelectrics Sensing Device and an Empatica Watch to capture initial emotional and physical responses. This detailed recording extends throughout the journey, capturing the participant’s immediate reactions to new environments and experiences, thus providing a foundation for artworks that reveal the relationship between human emotions, neuronal activity and new experiences through the lens of AI and data visualization.

Anadol and his team are proposing to turn the company’s history and the humanity’s collective memories of nature into a series of AI Data Paintings and Sculptures. The artwork will incorporate vivid pigments, shapes, and patterns to create a meditative and multisensory experience.