Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is an internationally renowned media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. He is the Director of Refik Anadol Studio in Los Angeles and Lecturer in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts. Anadol’s work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. Taking the data that surrounds us as primary material, and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol offers us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expands the possibilities of interdisciplinary arts. Anadol’s site-specific data paintings and sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, collective experiences, public art, decentralized networks, and the creative potential of AI.

For LUMINEX 3.0, Refik Anadol presents Artificial Realities: California Landscapes. Throughout art history, humans have explored their relationship with nature in countless ways—through the precision of realist landscapes and the emotive power of expressionist colors. In Artificial Realities: California Landscapes, Refik Anadol reimagines this connection by using AI as his ‘thinking brush,’ painting with data to reveal new ways of experiencing the natural world. Collaborating with a dataset of 153 million publicly available images of California’s National Parks, Anadol and his studio transformed this raw material into an AI Data Sculpture that offers a fresh perspective on nature, shaped by human-machine collaboration.

This project holds special significance for Refik Anadol Studio, as it’s a tribute to the city of Los Angeles, where Anadol’s artistic journey was embraced and nurtured. The artist’s exploration of AI-based art, using digital pigments to reimagine the landscape, began in Istanbul and led him to Los Angeles. This dynamic series of immersive landscapes encapsulates a decade of AI-driven creativity by Refik Anadol Studio, seen through the lens of California’s iconic natural beauty.

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