WIRED
He sees pools of data as raw material for visualizations that he calls a new kind of “sculpture.”
Giant stashes of data are valuable assets to corporations in industries from fossil fuels to finance. Artist Refik Anadol sees pools of data as something else—material for what he calls a new kind of “sculpture.”
Anadol creates mesmerizing art installations by seeking out interesting data sets and processing them into swirling visualizations of how computers capture the world and people in it. He does it by using techniques from artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning algorithms, to filter or expand on his raw material.
The results, shown on giant screens or projected onto walls or entire buildings, use data points in a kind of AI pointillism.
Anadol explains his creative process in a new WIRED video. It features works including Machine Hallucination, a 360-degree video installation made from 10 million photos of New York. Anadol used machine learning to group photos and morph between them, creating flickering images of the city as recorded by many different people. “It’s kind of like a collective memory,” he says. “A building in New York can be explored from multiple angles, from different times of the year.”