JING CULTURE & COMMERCE

When Casa Batlló reopened to the public in May, it did so with aplomb. Upon completion in the early 1900s, the house Gaudí designed for a local textile industrialist was visionary, a singular fairytale interpretation of art nouveau. By the 2010s, it was in need of revitalization. 

Beyond faithfully restoring the house to its former glory, Casa Batlló has undergone a digital transformation, one utilizing the full complement of tools popular in the art-tech space. This includes artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, augmented reality, 3D sound, olfactory interventions, and more. The result is the transformation of one of Barcelona’s most popular attractions into a veritable immersive journey, one the team behind it terms the world’s first 10D experience. 

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FINANCIAL TIMES

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“It’s a work of art,” says Gary Gautier, standing on the black marble steps of a serpentine staircase inside Barcelona’s Casa Batlló. A silver curtain shimmers behind him, rippling like the scales on a dragon’s back, while beneath his feet the underbelly of the staircase resembles the spinal vertebrae of the mythical beast. Gautier is a member of the Bernat family, who have owned the house designed by the famed Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí since the 1990s. The family have fully restored his masterpiece and as CEO Gautier, 36, is now future-proofing the tourist attraction (and Unesco World Heritage Site), which opened to the public in 2002, by collaborating with creatives such as Japanese architect Kengo Kuma to enhance Gaudí’s vision with “interventions” that will create an immersive experience inside the house.

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TIMEOUT

Immersive art is having a moment right now. No longer content with looking at paintings in frames or sculptures on plinths, we’ve got a taste for hypnotic, all-consuming gallery experiences. And this year, Coventry – the UK’s current City of Culture – is getting the country’s first permanent digital art space.

Set to open its doors to the public in April, the Reel Store will occupy a cavernous former newspaper office in the city centre. Much like the famous Atelier des Lumières in Paris, the building has essentially been converted into one big gallery space, designed as a home for video shows that can be projected all over the floor, ceiling and walls.

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MIAMI HERALD

The installation “Machine Hallucinations: Coral Dreams” by Turkish-American artist Refik Anadol, commissioned by Aorist and the Reef Line for Miami Art Week 2021, can be visited in Miami Beach during Art Week.

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MOMA

This week, on the new-media platform Feral File, artist Refik Anadol presents Unsupervised, an exhibition of works created by training an artificial intelligence model with the public metadata of The Museum of Modern Art’s collection. Spanning more than 200 years of art, from paintings to photography to cars to video games, the Museum’s collection represents a unique data set for an artist who has worked with many different public archives. The AI-based abstract images and shapes in Unsupervised are interpretations of the Museum’s wide-ranging collection, weighted toward the exhibition of new artworks at MoMA this fall.

Starting with the exhibition opening on November 18, new artworks will be revealed and released over three days. Each work will be made available to collectors as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs.

MoMA curators Paola Antonelli and Michelle Kuo sat down with Anadol and Casey Reas, the artist-founder of Feral File, to talk about the ecology of mobile images, art in the age of mechanical learning, and the question: What if a machine tried to create “modern art”?

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ELLE MAGAZINE

If you thought fashion week was the most exciting event to have taken place in Milan recently, think again: a few days ago, Bulgari opened a jaw-dropping new art installation, created through AI.

The Rome-based jeweller partnered with award-winning media artist Refik Anadol to make the immersive, digital artwork, said to be the first conceived by artificial intelligence for a luxury brand.

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ARCHINECT

Refik Anadol has carved an eclectic career, rich with confluences. His work blurs the boundaries between art and science, the visible and invisible, the operational and emotional, the fleeting and permanent. The composition of this studio further demonstrates this confluence; housing artists, architects, data scientists, and researchers, drawn from 10 countries and fluent in 14 languages. Since establishing Refik Anadol Studio in 2014, the Istanbul-born artist has produced a litany of projects that celebrate, and define, the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence, from his installation at Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2018 to his Sense of Space exhibition at the 2021 Venice Biennale.

Archinect’s Niall Patrick Walsh spoke with Anadol in September 2021 at an exciting time for the artist: not only during his ongoing project at the Venice Biennale, but also on the eve of his latest milestone: a first-of-its-kind NFT project to be auctioned by Sotheby’s Hong Kong.

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MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

It’s hard not to notice the two huge additions rising adjacent to the old Shaw Lane Power Plant. A myriad of activity is resulting in the erection of a first-of-its-kind for MSU – a STEM teaching and research facility constructed using mass timber…

“Several elements of the old plant were retained to lend an architectural/historical aspect to the project,” Gottschalk said. “The center boiler was kept and will serve as the project’s “art on campus” element.” He added, “Artist Refik Anadol is using the interior of the refurbished boiler to project artificial intelligence composed art.”

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