Refik Anadol

Refik Anadol is a media artist from Istanbul who works in Los Angeles. He studied photography, video and visual communication at Istanbul Bilgi University and design media arts at UCLA, where he now teaches. In 2014 he founded Refik Anadol Studio with Efsun Erkılıç. Its artists, architects and data scientists train machine learning models on large sets of images, sounds and readings such as weather, then show what the models generate as moving pictures he calls data paintings and data sculptures.

Much of the work is made for one building or one archive. WDCH Dreams (2018) was projected onto the Walt Disney Concert Hall for the Los Angeles Philharmonic's centennial. Unsupervised, built from data on MoMA's collection, played in the museum's lobby from November 2022 to October 2023, and MoMA then took it into its permanent collection as a gift from the 1OF1 and RFC collections. Later shows include Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive at the Serpentine in London (2024) and in situ: Refik Anadol at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2025), built around Living Architecture: Gehry.

In 2021 Sotheby's Hong Kong offered eight NFT works from Machine Hallucinations: Space, led by Space: Metaverse. Winds of Yawanawa, commissioned by Impact One, was made with the Yawanawá people of the Brazilian Amazon. Weather data from their village and about 30 artworks by the sisters Nawashahu and Mukashahu shaped the model, and the creator's share of sales went to the community. Christie's has sold Living Architecture: Casa Batlló (2022) and Living Memory: Messi, A Goal in Life (2025). He also co-founded Dataland, a museum of AI arts at The Grand LA, and received a TIME100 AI Impact Award in 2025.