Artist Profile: Refik Anadol—Memory, Data, and the Poetics of Imagination
Refik Anadol, artist.
The Texture of Data
Refik Anadol treats data like a material with memory. He gathers it, shapes it, and lets it become something that slips between architecture, atmosphere, and the blurred edges of recall. His installations do not explain. They surround. They breathe. They invite people to feel time folding over itself.
He began working this way long before “generative AI” was a familiar phrase. While studying media arts in Los Angeles, he was drawn to archives that felt dormant: museum records, environmental sensors, satellite imagery. He placed them into algorithms and waited to see what surfaced. The results rarely resembled the data itself. They looked instead like what the data seemed to remember.
In his breakthrough series Machine Hallucinations, Anadol worked with more than a hundred million public images of New York. He removed faces and people, leaving behind structures, weather, and light. The model began to remix the city through time. Skyscrapers glowed like lanterns in fog. Mid-century apartments dissolved into glass towers. The city became dreamlike, yet everything in it had once been touched, seen, lived.
“I wanted to explore several interrelated questions: Can a machine learn? Can it dream? Can it hallucinate?”
Anadol described to MoMA his thinking around this series, “I was purely a data artist, I guess, at the time. And I was truly blown away by how AI could profoundly change the thinking around producing art, and give us new tools. I wanted to explore several interrelated questions: Can a machine learn? Can it dream? Can it hallucinate?”
The point was never to crown machines as artists. Anadol invited them to remember with him. There is always a choice: what data to include, how to filter, when to let go. The ethics live in the workflow. The art emerges from how you build the system and what you ask it to carry.
Collective Traces, Nature, and Presence
At MoMA in 2022 he unveiled Unsupervised, a commission built from 138,151 metadata records from the museum’s collection. These were not images, just titles, dates, artists, and mediums. No categories were imposed. No rules. The algorithm was asked to drift. What appeared looked like paint in motion, sparks rising from water, clouds forming and dissolving. Visitors stood inside a room where the entire collection pulsed in real time, outside the museum’s usual categories.
“It is collaborating with a memory that doesn’t belong to me.”
Sometimes the record comes from institutions. Other times, from the natural world. In Glacier Dreams, Anadol worked with scientists and climate data to record the inner life of melting ice. He walked across glaciers with cameras and sensors, filming cracks and collapse, listening for sounds that might never be heard again. “The experience starts with the raw data, millions of images loading in this infinite library,” he told Artnet. “The audience is surrounded by the millions of ethical images of those beautiful glaciers.”
The installations are never only visual. Rooms shift temperature. They smell like minerals or rain. Audio moves as people walk through. Light adapts to time of day. His pieces become environments rather than displays.
For us at Mindset Art Collective, this idea — that data can hold emotion, place, and fragility — resonates. Our work with generative systems depends on where images come from, who makes them, and what stories they carry. We do not see machine-generated pieces as disposable. We look for what they record, for the silences they reveal. That is why Anadol’s approach feels close, even if our scale and context are different.
Image courtesy of ARTECHOUSE (artechouse.com)
Spectacle and Intimacy
Anadol reminds us that scale does not erase care. His works have covered opera houses and museums, painted the facades of skyscrapers, and reached NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he served as artist in residence. Yet he continually returns to transparency, process, and the quiet decisions made upstream. He frames these projects as living artworks that shift with their surroundings, where chance and audience interpretation remain central.
His career also insists that collaboration is the real medium. He builds projects with neuroscientists, glaciologists, philosophers, and marine biologists. He trains his own models. He works with open datasets. He understands that machines cannot feel, but they can extend perception. He does not claim AI consciousness. He builds systems that let people feel through AI.
“I’ve always been looking to produce a living artwork that is real-time interactive with the world around it. To that end, Unsupervised not only explores machine learning algorithms in a more interactive way, it also relies on audience interpretation while exploring the concepts of chance and control.”
At Mindset we admire this stance. Our collective is built from curators, artists, prompt designers, and engineers. We think of curation as choosing what belongs, what voices to hold, when to pause. We ask what a weekly stream of images could mean for a room, a mood, a sense of belonging. We are exploring how to make the traces of human choice visible. What if prompts could be shown like brushstrokes? What if a sequence of generative works responded to weather, history, or place? What if rhythm mattered as much as style?
Yet there is risk in scale. Petabytes of images, museum commissions, vast projections — these can become spectacles accessible only to those who can enter the institutions that house them. Immersive art can overwhelm as much as it invites. For us, that contrast is instructive. We work with smaller stages: a wall in a living room, a frame in a study, a rotation of pieces curated for mood and belonging. These are quieter scales, but no less meaningful.
Lessons for a Collective Philosophy
Anadol has warned against the easy spectacle of AI. “When we found fire, we cooked with it, we created communities; with the same technology we kill each other or destroy,” he explains to Wired.* His view is sober: technology is a force that must be guided with care. “Clearly AI is a discovery of humanity that has the potential to make communities, or destroy each other.” That reminder cuts through the hype. It also speaks directly to what we are trying to do at Mindset. Streams of digital art are not trivial. What we choose to include matters. What we omit matters even more.
McKinsey reports that Anadol records not just image and video, but environmental sounds, drone data, scent, temperature, weather information — all to build immersive installations that carry presence from many sources. He works with scientists and researchers to collect and use data responsibly and to preserve changes in ecosystems before they vanish. From this perspective, inclusivity matters: if AI is capable of anything, then its effects should be available to all, not only to those who can attend large institutions or enter curated spaces.
Visitors to his installations often pause in stillness. They do not scroll or swipe. They breathe. They watch light move and echoes surface. They let time pass differently. In that pause something shifts — not in the room, but in them. That is the effect we hope for too.
“If AI means anything and everything, then it must be for anyone and everyone.”
Refik Anadol is not our partner, and he does not speak for us. But his practice turns our attention back to the essentials: will the imprint of machine-made images linger, what are the ethics carried by curation, and the responsibility of keeping human choice visible in a field where algorithms never tire.
He stands near what we do, though on a larger stage. He works at the edge of recall, with one hand in the machine and the other steady on human presence. We admire that stance. It reminds us that art is not only what appears on the surface. It is the choices underneath, the intervals, the attention that turns data into experience. And it leaves us with the question we want readers to carry forward: when you live with digital art, what do you want it to remember for you?
* Head over to Wired to watch the full video interview showcasing Anadol’s work.
