REFIK ANADOL, LIVING PAINTINGS: PILEVNELI | YALIKAVAK

Refik Anadol, who defines his work as depicting the collective memories of humanity such as nature, space, urban culture and time, and visualises data through algorithms, is inspired by "the possibility that data can make the invisible visible". He reinforces the concept of data, a variable entity, with fluid dynamics or sound algorithms. As a new media artist, he seeks new forms of expression by constantly working on texture, shadow, pattern and advanced light experiences. He describes his multi-coloured, undulating and textured works based on different systems and information sources as "moving/living paintings". These digital images, which can also be described as three-dimensional dynamic sculptures overflowing from the surface, are created using materials such as data, sound, and light, while the tool he employs is artificial intelligence and the field he feeds on is generally the relationship between architecture and space. As a result, he creates colourful image sequences that are presented as pixels that are constantly fluctuating, fragmenting and merging, which move to three dimensions and question the possibility of architecture turning into a canvas, regardless of scale.

The artist and his team use computer-generated digital algorithms to create unforgettable experiences by transforming data into forms of expression that tell visual stories on screens, buildings, sculptures and immersive rooms. Anadol considers the hundreds of molecules swirling and moving in a flow in his work as a kind of pigment that never dries since he believes that digital data is always in a state of flux and will never cease. These fluid and dynamic images not only create a meditative visual effect but also establish powerful physical and auditory atmospheres in which the viewer feels completely immersed. The masses of aesthetic data rising, overflowing and advancing toward us on the surface, on the floor, on the ceiling, and in every space we interact with, reflect an important process and change in how technology positions the artist and the viewer in today's art world. By incorporating the past, experiencing the present and envisioning the potential future, the artist continues to work on the intersection between the latest technologies and aesthetics, how memories are visualised and how the machine learns, with a comprehensive team. In this context, he collects visual, auditory, seismic, geographical, meteorological, cultural and all kinds of conceivable data in cooperation with institutions including NASA and Google, creating important breaking points in his body of work with each new series.

*Neural Paintings (AI Data paintings): The States of Mind
Refik Anadol Studio's most recent research-based series of artworks that builds a bridge between bio-informatics and aesthetics, Neural Paintings is based on a dataset collected with EEG DSI-VR300 Research-Grade Sensing Device for brain-computer interface. As the device measures activity from the visual cortex of the brain, Anadol and his team obtain a growing dataset that reflects in-depth information about excitement and focus data collected from individuals in given time frames. This raw dataset is then filtered to create visualization samples in which Excitement data informs the animation’s speed and Focus data generates the scale. In the final stage, our machine-human collaboration extrudes final Data Paintings that exhibit unprecedented representations of emotional memory. These all-white-monochrome AI data paintings of fluid imagery represent meditative, negative, and positive states of the mind respectively.

*The Winds of LA (AI Data Paintings): The Wind of Change
Creating art with public data can generate new collective memories that intricately merge with the natural and institutional histories of their surroundings. Refik Anadol Studio’s projects in urban spaces are based on the analysis and artistic interpretation of vast datasets of human experience of all kinds, including transportation, bodily movement, and impact on the environment. “The wind shows us how close to the edge we are,” writes the great Californian writer Joan Didion. Indeed, the wind feels stronger when we are on the verge of change. The faster we run to push the boundaries, the more we sense the world changing. "Winds of LA" harnesses a vast dataset from real-time API weather sensors placed around LA that collect wind speed, direction, gust patterns, and temperature. The artwork streams data into experimental fluid motion aesthetics – a unique visual interpretation of the fluidity of interactions between the environment and the city. Specifically designed for the LA audience, Winds of LA aims to connect them with the patterns of invisible natural events.

*California Landscapes: From random images to the fluidity of the city
Humans’ relationship to nature has been represented in countless ways in art history, from realist landscape paintings to expressionist depictions of earthly colors. For Artificial Realities: California Landscapes, Anadol uses a thinking brush and paints with data to show how human-machine collaborations can help us experience nature in a new light. California Landscape Studies exhibits mesmerizing experimentation with the Stable Diffusion model – one of the most groundbreaking technologies of artificial intelligence in image production. In the first part of the series, using StyleGAN2-ADA** to capture the machine’s “hallucinations” of California landscapes and colors in a multi-dimensional space, Refik Anadol Studio trained a unique AI model with subsets of the collected image archive. Each image in the series displays a cluster of chosen “hallucinations,” and Anadol makes selections from countless serendipitous allusions to landscape images occurring in “the machine-mind.” After the training, when idle and unsupervised, the AI generates abstracted landscapes, constructing new aesthetic visuals and color combinations based on the dataset and through unique lines drawn by algorithmic connections. These works reflect Anadol's vision of managing data in a universe of his own creation and the mysterious field of data visualisation as a space that allows for infinite, self-generating thought.

 

*These chapters are prepared by only making minor additions to Refik Anadol's original artwork descriptions.
**StyleGAN2-ADA is a version of generative adversarial networks (GAN), an artificial intelligence method.