Can a Building Dream, Learn, and Hallucinate? A Conversation with Refik Anadol
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. In the context of our conversation, the project seems almost inevitable for Anadol; taking a cutting-edge representation of art in the machine age, from infinitely generative data paintings to AI data sculptures, and blending it with the cutting-edge blockchain infrastructure set to host that age. Arguably, this is Anadol’s greatest asset, and his greatest contribution to the built environment: an ability to take an invisible, unattainable idea beyond our everyday reality, and make it not only visible in our present day , but somehow defining of it.
