(Repost @design.emergency) Tune into @design.emergency’s video channel to watch our co-founder, Paola Antonelli, interview artist Refik Anadol, whose data-based, site-specific installations have not only helped define contemporary machine intelligence’s aesthetics but also highlighted its potential in creating a new form of public art, accessible and rich in memory and meaning. Together, they discussed the pleasures and perils of AI and Web3, as prototyped in the art realm. Born in Istanbul in 1985, Refik moved to Los Angeles to study for a second master’s in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts, under the tutelage of media art pioneer Casey Reas. “I am obsessed with data,” Refik admits, and he had a chance to indulge and perfect his obsession at both UCLA and the Google Artists and Machine Intelligence program, where he was in residence in 2016. There, he learned the impact that AI can have in the “hands” of an artist, in particular through use generative adversarial networks, or GANs, “a type of neural network that can generate new content instead of simply analyzing or processing existing content,” as he explains. Existing content consists of data in all forms, pictures, text, sounds––which the AI Refik trained processes to generate new imagery that is informed by the original data, often perceptibly so. His first experiment––for the Istanbul-based SALT archive––was followed by several site-specific commissions. In 2018, his AI processed 45 terabytes of data from the archives of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, rendered with a spectacular video projection onto the Walt Disney Concert Hall––the famed building by Frank Gehry. In Quantum Memories at National Gallery Victoria in Melbourne in 2020, the AI processed approximately 200 million nature and landscape images from all over the planet. Refik’s body of work “addresses the challenges, and the possibilities, that ubiquitous computing has imposed on humanity, and what it means to be a human in the age of AI.” More in the conversation >>> shorturl.at/GKLW6 Images: Quantum Memories and WDCH Dreams (courtesy the artist) #refikanadol #designemergency #ai #web3 #machineart #machinedreams #gans