New York Times
By Frank Rose
LOS ANGELES — Can a concert hall dream? The Los Angeles Philharmonic has a lot riding on the answer.
On Sept. 27, with big-ticket donors watching expectantly from a parking lot across the street, Refik Anadol, a Turkish-American artist, plans to transform the billowing steel superstructure of the orchestra’s Walt Disney Concert Hall into a swirling, phantasmagorical collage.
The 12-minute performance will be fashioned from artifacts from the Philharmonic’s own history: millions of photographs, printed programs and audio and video recordings, each one digitized, microcrunched and algorithmically activated to play in abstract form across the building’s dynamic metal surface. If all goes according to plan, “WDCH Dreams,” as the production is known, will kick off the Philharmonic’s centennial season with the kind of brio that befits the company that Zachary Wolfe described last year in The New York Times as “the most important orchestra in America. Period.”
Mr. Anadol, a bubbly and rather cherubic-looking 32-year-old who dresses entirely in black, likes to imagine the building, which was designed by Frank Gehry, as an enormous artificial intelligence, one that recalls the orchestra’s past and slips into reverie about its future. A few weeks ago, armed with animations and storyboards, he showed up at the Philharmonic’s administrative offices, in an elegant but understated building next to the concert hall, to detail his progress.
Gathered in a small conference room were Kenric McDowell, an artificial-intelligence expert from Google, and several Philharmonic officials, chief among them Chad Smith, the orchestra’s chief operating officer and de facto head of programming, a man whose preppy demeanor belies a reputation as one of the most innovative figures in classical music.
The building’s “performance,” staged for patrons paying upward of $2,500 per person for the opening-night gala and free to all on the nine evenings after that, falls into three parts. First, “Centennial Memories,” when data from the Philharmonic’s history — 44.5 terabytes of it, Mr. Anadol reported — is projected onto the building’s skin…