Artist Refik Anadol Uses AI to Turn Data Into Dreams

For over a decade, Refik Anadol has been making machines dream. Alongside his team at Refik Anadol Studio, the Turkish-American artist has become internationally renowned for producing large-scale, hypnotic works that breathe life into data. By using AI to discern patterns from vast datasets, Anadol has pioneered new forms, like AI data paintings and data sculptures, that he co-creates with the AI systems processing the data, producing distinct and constantly-evolving audiovisual experiences. In this way, Anadol offers the world novel, beautiful, ways to experience art and AI.

He and his team have produced more than 50 works of dazzling scale and diversity over the past decade. From the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Serpentine Galleries in London to a Zaha Hadid building in Seoul and an airport in Charlotte, N.C., he’s created immersive art for galleries and public spaces across the world, including hospitals, stadiums, and universities. And later this year he plans to open the world’s first AI art museum in Los Angeles.

To make “Unsupervised,” an exhibition at MoMA that opened in 2022 as part of his “Machine Hallucinations” series, Anadol trained an AI system on the museum’s extensive public archive to construct colorful, abstract, shifting forms, simulating how a machine might reimagine 200 years of art. After nearly a year on display in the museum’s lobby—during which almost three million people experienced the work, spending an average of 38 minutes viewing it—“Unsupervised” became the first generative AI work to be added to MoMA’s permanent collection.

Another first-of-its-kind work debuted in 2023, when he transformed the Las Vegas Sphere’s curved exterior screen into a data sculpture, drawing on archival images of space and nature to light up the giant LED globe with the swirling colors characteristic of his Machine Hallucinations series. He was the first artist invited to use the Sphere. For Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló in Barcelona, Anadol has created multiple works, including one in August, seeking to explore the modernist architect’s mind, processing over a billion images of his work through AI to, as Anadol says, “let the building dream and hallucinate.”

“Now is the first time in history we have a technology that can reason, that transforms electrons into a form of intelligence, and that we can interact with,” says Anadol. “We are encountering something as important as anything that happened in the Renaissance.” For Anadol, AI is the “ultimate tool” to question what it means to be human.

Support from “the best of the best in the AI space,” he says, has been key to his ability to construct these projects. Since serving as the first artist-in-residence for Google’s Artist + Machine Intelligence program in 2016, Anadol has collaborated extensively with Nvidia, which frequently provides the computing power to create his novel AI systems. His open-source Large Nature Model trained on half a billion images and other kinds of “ethically-sourced data”—including publicly available archives of the National Geographic Society, Smithsonian Institution, and London’s Natural History Museum, and data he and his team collected directly from rainforests in Indonesia, Australia, and the Amazon—to produce a system that can “reason through image, sound, text, and scent,” he says.

Anadol is adamant that “if AI is for anything and everything, it has to be for anyone and everyone.” He frequently spotlights social issues in his work, drawing attention to climate change or amplifying indigenous people’s voices. In 2023, he collaborated with the Brazilian Yawanawa community, merging weather data from the Amazon rainforest with the work of young Yawanawa artists to create a series of NFT artworks for sale on the blockchain that raised $3 million for the community. “We are not just using technology because it is technology: we are finding its values, mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally, and financially to transform the value of the experience back to the people who need that value,” he says.

While many artists are concerned about AI’s potential to devalue their work, Anadol views the technology as his collaborator, rather than his replacement. “I don’t give the AI system agency to take my creativity from me. And I’ve never met anyone who wants to do that,” he says.

He hopes he and his team have made the medium of digital art much more understandable, and says he’s heard they’ve also contributed to their audience’s well-being. “Life is truly complicated, and it’s not always bright. There is separation, conflict, war, loss. I found our works became a form of escapism for some people, who found joy, inspiration, and hope,” he says.

Anadol’s next project may be his most ambitious yet: Dataland, billed as “the world’s first Museum of AI Arts,” where visitors can interact with AI characters and new, immersive environments with all their senses—even smelling, tasting, and touching them. Set to open in Los Angeles later this year, its inaugural exhibition is created through Anadol’s Large Nature Model, which is also accessible as a “living encyclopedia” on the Dataland website. After a frenetic first decade, Anadol has come to think of AI as a mirror for humanity, reflecting back our imperfections. “In our second decade, my purpose is to truly understand the human fabric—our soul, our mind, our spirituality—and how we can positively contribute to solving problems beyond just shiny pixels.”

This profile is published as a part of TIME’s TIME100 Impact Awards initiative, which recognizes leaders from across the world who are driving change in their communities. The next TIME100 Impact Awards ceremony will be held on Feb. 10 in Dubai.

Contact us at letters@time.com.