Taisei Manheim – Looking Outward – 08

Refik Anadol is a media artist and director born in Istanbul that currently lives in Los Angeles. He is the co-founder and creative director of Antilop, a technology-driven creative design studio operating at the intersection of audio-visual performances, moving images, and interactive installations. He creates site-specific public art that uses a parametric data sculpture approach, as well as live visual or audio performances within immersive installations. His work often creates a hybrid relationship between architecture and media arts with machine intelligence. As someone that studies architecture, I appreciate how he uses light as an architectural median in order to create buildings with memories that can learn, dream and remember.

My favorite project by him was WDCH Dreams, a project in which he projects visualizations onto the Walt Disney Concert Hall. In order to make the building “dream” he collected 45 terabytes of data from the LA Phil data archives. He then applied machine intelligence to the digital archives in order to create a computerized mind that processed these memories to form new combinations of images and ideas. I admire this project because of the amount of preparation that went into the project, from remodeling every detail of the Disney Concert Hall from old Catia models to processing all of the data. In addition, the Disney Concert Hall is a building that I admire and it is fascinating to see a new layer of meaning on top of it.

Eyeo 2019 – Refik Anadol