Refik Anadol’s AI-Based Digital Art and Its Intellectual Connotations

Abstract

This article delves into the digital art produced by the internationally renowned Turkish artist Refik Anadol and his team, emerging at the intersection of diverse disciplines such as mathematics, physics, computer science, and aesthetics, within the context of its intellectual connotations. This qualitative study encompasses 26 projects featured on the Refik Anadol Studio’s website. In addition to the projects, we utilize as data sources the videos, visuals and texts that are available on the website, Anadol’s social media posts, audience comments, interviews, academic articles, and news and critiques related to his works. We analyze the works in the context of the artistic creation process, the nature of the technological collaboration, the relationship established with memory, time, space and audience, particularly in the context of the meanings they signify, and we assess the data we obtain along with their philosophical connections. In short, Anadol transforms public data such as images, sounds, and social media posts that constitute collective memory into art with the aid of digital technology capabilities, especially artificial intelligence, creating in these works molecular, fluid, transient intermediate spaces by superimposing different temporal and spatial layers, images, and realities. Through art, he opens up for discussion questions such as what is the position of the artist in the age of artificial intelligence; how art can help us understand the relationship between the virtual and the real; and what it means to experience memory in the digital age. The heterotopic spaces he constructs in his works offer utopian imagery which suggests a life based on peace, optimism, and relationship shared among humans, nature, and other forms of existence.