Refik Anadol (Turkish American, b. 1985) is a media artist who reworks vast datasets into immersive, AI-generated installations, projecting archives and environmental information onto architecture and gallery walls in a practice he calls “data painting”.,,He is the director and co-founder of Refik Anadol Studio in Los Angeles, which he founded with Efsun Erkılıç in 2014.,
Anadol earned a Master of Fine Arts in design media arts at UCLA, where he later taught and studied under mentors including Casey Reas.,In 2017 he used machine learning to trace correlations across 1.7 million documents from Istanbul's SALT Research archive for Archive Dreaming. The following year, working with neuroscientists at UC San Francisco's Neuroscape Laboratory, he translated EEG data linked to Alzheimer's disease into Melting Memories, which won the Lumen Prize Gold Award. For WDCH Dreams (2018), commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for its centennial, he mapped decades of the orchestra's archive onto the exterior of Walt Disney Concert Hall.,
In 2020 Anadol used Google's quantum-computing research to process roughly 200 million nature images into Quantum Memories, commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria.His 2022 installation Unsupervised at the Museum of Modern Art in New York drew on 138,151 metadata records from the museum's collection to generate a continuously shifting data sculpture in the lobby.,,Extended four times over nearly a year, it was acquired by MoMA in 2023 as the first generative artwork in its permanent collection.,Critics were divided: Jerry Saltz called the piece a “massive techno lava lamp”, while Anadol countered that visitors spent an average of 38 minutes in front of the work.
In 2023 he collaborated with the Yawanawá community of the Amazon on Winds of Yawanawa, later held in the Le Random Collection, whose sales channeled funds directly to the community.,,The following year he introduced the Large Nature Model, an open-source AI system trained on datasets from National Geographic and the Smithsonian Institution, unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos.In 2025 Living Architecture: Gehry used a custom model trained on Frank Gehry's architectural archive to animate the facade of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.,In June 2026 Anadol and Erkılıç opened Dataland, a for-profit museum of AI art at Gehry's Grand LA complex in Los Angeles, with the inaugural exhibition “Machine Dreams: Rainforest”.,Reviewers found the show's immersive spectacle, built from over a billion data points, overwhelming and thin on substance, with one comparing Anadol's business acumen to his art.,
