Refik Anadol, The Art World’s Happy Warrior for A.I.
“All right!” Refik Anadol said, as the escalator carried us downward. “We are entering the dream of the machine.” We had arrived in the cavernous first gallery of Dataland, the twenty-five-thousand-square-foot space, in downtown Los Angeles, that Anadol calls the first museum of A.I. art. Space-age music blared night-club-loud as pictures of birds, plants, and flowers cascaded down the walls. This array was a small sample of the half-billion images—and the hundred thousand hours of audio, including birdsong, rain, and even silence—on which Anadol has trained the Large Nature Model, an A.I. model that powers “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” Dataland’s inaugural show. The pictures swooped around and beneath us like a cloud of starlings, and an earthy, slightly metallic smell emanated from the diffusers we wore around our necks, which, along with a biometric wristband, each Dataland visitor receives upon arrival. The aroma is one of twelve scents—formulated by the L.N.M., with a little help from L’Oréal Luxe—that perfume visitors’ trips through the museum’s five rooms. Anadol calls it “the scent of data.”
Data is Anadol’s alpha and omega, his medium and his muse. He often works with large archives, or, as with the L.N.M., scientific data gathered by organizations such as the Smithsonian Institution and London’s Natural History Museum, and by his own researchers in rain forests across the world. “Visualization” is too humble a word for the operations that Anadol performs, though in recent years his work has been unusually visible. His art has lit up the Sphere, in Las Vegas; the stage of the Grammy Awards, in L.A.; and the halls of the World Economic Forum at Davos and the United Nations in New York. He has done “collaborations”—the industry euphemism for upscale advertisements—with Bulgari, Dior, and Hennessy. He has permanent installations in Boston’s Logan Airport, and in JPMorgan Chase’s gargantuan new headquarters in midtown Manhattan. And in 2022, amidst a blowout year-long show, his “Unsupervised: Machine Hallucinations” became the first generative-A.I. art work—and one of the first linked to non-fungible tokens—to enter the MOMA collection, and with it the canon of contemporary art.
MOMA felt very far away as the images around us gave way to a “Matrix”-like environment of grids strobing to a driving beat. Anadol was describing how measurements from various rain forests were informing what I was seeing, but I was struggling to absorb our surroundings. “It’s overwhelming,” I told Anadol. “The room is seven hundred and twenty million pixels,” he replied, by way of explanation. The sensory overload, he added, was meant to evoke “the sublime power of being connected to incredibly vast data sets,” which Anadol views as the “new language of humanity.”
After about fifteen minutes, the surging graphics and music stopped, and we were in near-darkness. As strings started to play Mahler’s Third Symphony, the smell of wet earth rose from our diffusers, and a virtual rainstorm began. There was a delicate pulse in the background; Anadol explained that it was an average of our heartbeats, which, along with our galvanic response and body temperature, was being measured by our wristbands and processed by Dataland’s “Connectome,” a miniature data center with top-of-the-line chips provided by Nvidia. The storm built until the walls and floor were covered with pale gray particles, billowing like smoke, then tessellating in triangles. The model learns in subtle ways from each visitor, but your data is automatically deleted, though you can ask for a copy first. (Guests can also choose to skip the wristband and go through as “ghosts.”) “There is nothing, like, recorded here,” Anadol said. “It’s not a place for surveillance or whatever.”
Eventually, as horns and strings held triumphal chords, everything dissolved into what Anadol calls data pigmentation: a roiling sea of polychrome spheres, like a ball pit come to life. Each represented a data point in the L.N.M., and all were somehow responding to our presence. “I love this feeling so much,” Anadol said. “For five thousand years, we have looked at art work and felt something. But can the art work feel us back?”
An energetic forty-year-old who wears all black all the time, and who rarely stops smiling beneath his round black-rimmed glasses, Anadol speaks less of problems than of possibilities. At his studio, in L.A.’s Frogtown neighborhood, some twenty data scientists, engineers, and architects work on dual-screen monitors, and occasionally walk on treadmills at standing desks. Anadol’s black Range Rover bears a license plate with an e-ink screen, which he programmed to read “Blade Runner,” beneath his plate number. (The film is Anadol’s most frequent cultural reference, though less for its dystopian plot than for what he calls its “vibe.”) He wears a black Oura ring on his right index finger and, sometimes, on his right wrist, a blue-bead bracelet made for him by members of the Yawanawá tribe in western Brazil, which he and Efsun Erkılıç—his creative and life partner, Dataland’s co-founder, and, as she put it, its “worst critic”—have visited routinely for immersion in the rain forest, along with the occasional trip on a local variant of ayahuasca. Through N.F.T. sales, the couple has raised millions of dollars for the tribe.
Anadol studied photography and design at Bilgi University, in Istanbul, and earned a second M.F.A. at U.C.L.A., where his teachers included the noted media artist Casey Reas. But his formal education was supplemented, and subsidized, by tech companies. A Microsoft award covered some of his early research expenses, and in 2016 he was a fellow at Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence program. There he worked with Mike Tyka, who had helped develop DeepDream, a program that used neural networks, trained on millions of images, to generate psychedelic patterns. “That moment to me is so important,” Anadol said. “That concept of, if a machine can learn, can it dream?” Ever since, Anadol has spoken of putting a “camera in the mind of the machine” to see what it “hallucinates” when trained on the large bodies of data—always used with permission, often by invitation—that he and his team meticulously prepare. In addition to wall- and even room-size “data sculptures” made with, say, wind data or tourist photos of New York or brain-wave measurements or digital archives of Renaissance art, he also produces dynamic “data paintings” that might be displayed in a museum or purchased by a collector.
Anadol enjoyed an early triumph in 2018, when he lit up the silver sails of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, with projections developed using terabytes of recordings, program notes, and archival documents from the L.A. Philharmonic. But he wasn’t widely known until 2022, when “Unsupervised” arrived at MOMA. The show followed a series of digital art works which Anadol sold as N.F.T.s., and from which MOMA quietly earned a portion of the proceeds. Buoyed by the promise of digital art, and perhaps by its revenue, the museum displayed Anadol’s work on a twenty-four-foot-tall high-definition L.E.D. screen in the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby, where it was among the first things visitors saw.
To make “Unsupervised,” Anadol trained an A.I. on more than two hundred years’ worth of art from MOMA’s collection: not just paintings and sculptures but video games, films, and design objects, along with their associated metadata. Then his team had the model identify patterns beyond human-imposed categories like “Abstract Expressionism,” say, or “nineteenth century.” Technically, what appeared onscreen were visions from the “mind” of the model as it moved through its map of the collection, and as it responded to site-specific information like the weather and sounds made by visitors. Visually, the result was a restlessly fluctuating Technicolor whorl. Abstractions that looked like scribbled pastels or Helen Frankenthaler oils or the iTunes visualizer would give way to churning data pigment, sloshing in a square frame. Soothing ambient music played in the background.
“Refik devised different ways of essentially diagramming, visualizing, and then even animating the history of modern art,” Michelle Kuo, one of the curators who organized the exhibition, told me. She compared it to the Surrealists and their “automatic” art, the whimsical painting machines made by the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, and the collaboration between engineers from Bell Labs and Robert Rauschenberg.
“Unsupervised” was wildly popular and eminently Instagrammable. Glenn Lowry, the former head of MOMA, credits the work with helping rebuild attendance after the pandemic, and saw it as a mise en abyme for the museum. “We acquire works of art and then we often sell those works of art in order to acquire new works of art,” Lowry told me. “The collection is in a constant state of metabolism and ‘Unsupervised’ is a metabolic project.” It was eventually metabolized itself: toward the close of the show, MOMA announced that it had accepted “Unsupervised” as a donation; one of the piece’s former owners, a crypto investor and digital-art collector, now sits on the museum’s board.
The critical reaction was more ambivalent. Lloyd Wise, in Artforum, noted how the piece evoked “the broader modernist tendency toward noncomposition,” and Sebastian Smee, in the Washington Post, called it an “early masterpiece of AI-generated art.” Jerry Saltz, in New York, dismissed the work as a “pointless museum mediocrity,” “some cross between relaxation exercise and euphoric TED Talk and NSA levels of data mining.” Ben Davis, in perhaps the most substantial treatment, wrote in Artnet that “Unsupervised” presented MOMA’s collection as “just a bunch of random visual tics to be permuted, rather than an archive of symbol-making practices with social meanings.” He suggested that Anadol’s “purely decorative, cheerleader-ish style of A.I. art”—as opposed to the social and political analyses of A.I. offered by the likes of Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl—is one of the reasons he has received so much support from tech giants.
It takes a certain chutzpah to use the most consequential technology of the age—a technology which makes many deeply uneasy—without somehow bringing those problems into the work. But for Anadol, art critical of A.I. is important yet “predictable,” he told me. “I don’t think there’s anything unusual about being there,” he said. “What is unusual to me is being here.”
Anadol refers to his collectors and patrons, like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, as “pioneers.” “Good or bad for humanity, I don’t know, but they are pioneers of their field,” he told me. “And I think that needs to be matched by another breakthrough. It needs another pioneership.” He drew a comparison to the Renaissance, when an artist might be offered a chance to paint a chapel ceiling. “Jump cut, I feel, like, ‘Hey, Refik, here’s a G.P.U. we are building. We believe this will change the world, and we believe that you can use this for good.’ ”
In that case, I asked, Jensen Huang would represent the Medici?
“Can be,” he replied. “I mean, we can be critical about those giants, and what they do for societies and governments. Again, my other colleagues are very good at that. But what I’m trying to understand is, what is this really doing to the medium? What is it doing to the painting, to the brush, to the canvas?”
When it comes to technology, Anadol’s preoccupations are ultracontemporary, but the way he talks about his role as an artist has more in common with the raw ambition of early modern painters and sculptors, or indeed of the tech founders he counts as friends and customers, than with the language of critique preferred by his peers. And yet this disconnect is partly why “Unsupervised” was a landmark. The piece made a broader public think, and worry, about how A.I. would change culture, and how it would bring new audiences, new money, and new ethical quandaries into the art world. And it marked the arrival of a new art-world character: a dreamer articulating a future for creativity on the stages of TED (where he has spoken twice) and the Nvidia annual conference (where Anadol presented work made with the L.N.M.), and now marshalling enormous resources to found a museum from scratch. Anadol’s positivity is not unheard of in his field: Andy Warhol, another innovative pop artist accused of being superficial and overly commercial, shaped his persona around “liking” everything. But, unlike Warhol, it’s hard to read Anadol or his work as ironic. I always had the sense that he meant exactly what he said.
“Now we are entering the place for discovery, the place for sharing,” Anadol told me, as we plunged deeper into Dataland. We’d left the ball pit and gone through a dark hallway to the Latent Gallery, a narrow rectangular space in which various wall-sized screens offered different ways of interacting with the L.N.M. One lets you use a tablet for “machine drawing,” squiggling with your finger to provoke a response from the model. I selected “Blue Milk Mushroom” from a list and drew a mushroom shape; a hyper-realistic fungus with three caps appeared, surrounded by a pixie dust that conveyed, in a visual language I must have learned from video games, life and freshness. “The biomes are inspiring the drawing techniques,” Anadol said. Another station featured a “UMAP Browser,” which lets you navigate through the model’s training data and presents little factoids about various natural specimens.
The next gallery—with screens on the walls, floor, and ceiling—contained the most transparently narrative part of “Machine Dreams”: an eight-minute journey through an idyllic forest world that resembles “Avatar.” First, you fall through a sort of wormhole teeming with blossoms and butterflies. Then a glass hummingbird—Anadol told me that the figure came to him in a dream, and was interpreted by a Yawanawá chief as sacred—leads us through a valley, following a stream that flows beneath our feet. We eventually arrive at a giant glowing tree, which opens yet another portal into a kind of cyber tunnel, its geometric forms flashing in blue, red, and purple. When we come out the other end, we hear a mournful birdsong. “At the deepest root of the wisdom tree’s memory is a single song,” the screen reads. “In 1987, the last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird sang to a partner that no longer existed. He left pauses in the dark for her to answer. We hold the silence for him.” In a show mostly devoid of explicit messages, the sentiment surprised me.
The bird’s plangent call echoed among other nighttime sounds as we processed to the final room, a high-ceilinged Sanctuary. Our biometric data appeared on the far wall—heart rate, time spent in the museum, “emotional temperature.” “This piece is a real-time reflection of all we collected and shared and felt,” Anadol said. I noticed the machine judged me “contemplative.” “So we will uplift the energy!” Anadol said with a laugh. On a towering screen appeared an enormous data painting: first the familiar multicolored spheres, and then marvellous garlands of bright little flowers, swirling as a Yawanawá song played. “We want to let the sanctuary heal us,” Anadol said. On our way out of the gallery, we passed through the Design Store, where you can buy T-shirts generated from your data. Those who purchase the most expensive tickets (for a hundred and twenty-nine dollars; the starting price is forty-nine) get what Anadol calls “edible data sculptures,” rain-forest-flavored chocolate formulated with the A.I.’s help.
Anadol reassured me that the L.N.M.’s training data was ethically sourced, and that the Google cloud-computing facility running the museum mainly uses renewable power. But it wasn’t until after I’d left that I realized that climate change, habitat destruction, and all other human impacts on the environment go unmentioned in “Machine Dreams.” The conservation status of animals and environments is not included in the UMAP-browser interface, and the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird’s extinction is mourned almost as a mythical event, dated but nonetheless out of time; no cause is indicated.
The A.I. itself is presented similarly, so heavily aestheticized as to seem like a force of nature without a history, only awesome power. I tried hard to make sense of the various explanatory screens at Dataland, but found them more symbolic than helpful: the charts and graphs were dense and often labelled with acronyms; some showed scrolling lines of code, meaningful only to a programmer. (Visitors are now able to pose questions to a chatbot on their phones.) Instead of glimpsing into the “black box” of the model, I felt as if I were staring at its outside painted in Day-Glo. The machine is watching you, learning from you, but you never know exactly how.
For that reason, I think, Anadol’s quieter abstractions provide the most meaningful moments in “Machine Dreams”: the ghostly rain that moves to the Mahler, the data pigment that churns and cascades, the final monumental living painting that dances on the wall. Such work moves beyond spectacle—the kind supplied by “immersive experiences” like TeamLAB, or indeed Disneyland—to get at something like sense. No matter what data you feed into an A.I. model, it always remains abstract. Technical distinctions aside, the L.N.M. doesn’t see the rain forest any differently than “Unsupervised” saw MOMA’s collection. Nature is just more grist for the mill, and we are, too.
Anadol told me that he hopes Dataland gets the public to “think about the fears and concerns of humanity, to feel and hear things that are inaudible in everyday life.” He compared himself to James Turrell, doing with information what Turrell did with light. “I’m trying to find the same feelings with data in places that don’t exist yet,” he said. Whether that place seems like a pleasure-dome or a panopticon is up to you.
The day after visiting Dataland, I drove about forty miles east to Pomona College, where Turrell’s “Dividing the Light” sits in a small grove of palms in the middle of campus. I got there around half past seven, and joined a few others beneath the structure’s canopy: an off-white frame, lofted high on skinny columns, that opens onto the sky. Around eight, hidden lights began to bathe the canopy in a purple glow. Some of the people around me spoke quietly, but mainly we sat in silence. For the next hour or so, the colors of the canopy shifted, slowly but perceptibly, as the sky clung to its blue and then, after lingering in the inkiest navy for just a few precious minutes, seemed to give it all away. Somehow, with nothing but a square hole, Turrell pulls the sky downward, defamiliarizing the most familiar sight there is, making you look with loving care at the thing that’s too big, too far away to love. There’s nothing hidden from you. The magic is that there is no magic. If I weren’t telling you now, no one would know that I was ever there. ♦