Refik Anadol’s Melting Memories is an installation in Istanbul.
I admire the complexity and synchronicity of the work. The way that certain components melt into one another and reform or reappear later has a very aesthetic quality. I also admire the algorithms and dataset it took to generate this work. Anadol’s work often takes massive datasets and expresses them visually. One thing I admire about his works is how he uses data as a pigment, to express what is normally unseen.
Anadol partnered with the Neuroscape Laboratory at UCSF and collected EEG data from participants’ hippocampus region to create Melting Memories. Anadol’s creative team (comprised of AI and CS experts) developed a neural network to convert the EEG data into procedural noise which could be visually interpolated. Given the uniqueness of this dataset, it is likely that Melting Memories was created using custom software.
The work was inspired by Anadol’s uncle’s getting Alzheimers which making him consider the computational foundation of memory. Future works that may take inspiration from Anadol’s work may make clever use of data from different kinds of signals of the body.