Refik Anadol: Living Paintings
925 N Orange Dr
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Living Paintings, Refik Anadol’s first major solo exhibition in Los Angeles will open at Jeffrey Deitch on February 18, 2023. The exhibition will showcase the complete series of Anadol’s artworks that are based on California-related datasets, and explore his fascination with the environments – physical, public, virtual, and multidimensional – that play an instrumental role in shaping his artistic vision. Merging collective memories of urban life and nature with groundbreaking machine learning and visualization technologies, Living Paintings invites a poetic and futuristic contemplation of purposeful human-machine collaborations.
Anadol’s AI Data Paintings and Sculptures extend a uniquely dynamic relationship between art, technology, and architecture into the future, activating multiple senses and evoking simultaneous belongings. The primary thread that runs throughout his groundbreaking visualizations of the unseen world is the utilization of data as pigment to create enriched immersive environments. For this exhibition, Anadol will harness environmental data such as wind speed, temperature, and air pressure collected from sensors around Los Angeles, images of national parks in California (the largest dataset of this kind ever to be used for an artwork), and publicly available wind forecast data collected from the Pacific Ocean. By training these datasets with machine learning algorithms and visualizing them through his unique approach to fluid dynamics, Anadol presents entirely new data narratives.
The exhibition will also feature Anadol’s iconic Infinity Room that has traveled around the world and been experienced by more than 2 million people. This iteration of Infinity Room pays homage to Los Angeles by translating its data into a mesmerizing immersive installation. A large media wall that features real-time Pacific Ocean data, Pacific Dreams, emphasizes our embeddedness in nature and presents an entirely new and poetic way of connecting to it. Machine Hallucinations: National Parks turns vast photographic datasets of landscape photographs into multi-sensory experiences to commemorate the beauty of the earth we share.
Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is an internationally renowned media artist, director, and leader in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. He is also a lecturer in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts. His 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 the arts, architecture, narrative, and the body in motion. Anadol’s site-specific AI data sculptures, live audiovisual performances, and environmental installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, decentralized networks, collective experience, and the creative potential of machines. Anadol’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Centre Pompidou-Metz, National Gallery of Victoria, Venice Architecture Biennale, Hammer Museum, Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Ars Electronica Festival, Istanbul Design Biennial, and ZKM | Center for Art and New Media. In 2018, Anadol collaborated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for WDCH Dreams, a live audio-visual performance projected on façade of Frank Gehry’s iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall in celebration of the orchestra’s centennial. Refik Anadol: Unsupervised, the artist’s first solo North American museum presentation, opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York on November 19, 2022.