Name: Dreaming With Machines And The World’s First AI Museum
Uploaded: 2025-07-23
Duration: 17 min 16 s
Description: From data to delight, Refik Anadol transforms algorithms into art. In this immersive visual showcase, the pioneering media artist behind the world’s first AI museum blurs the line between code and creativity—inviting us to imagine what machines see when they sleep.

From data to delight, Refik Anadol transforms algorithms into art. In this immersive visual showcase, the pioneering media artist behind the world’s first AI museum blurs the line between code and creativity—inviting us to imagine what machines see when they sleep. 

Dreaming With Machines And The World’s First AI Museum

Conferences

All right. Our next guest is a pioneer in AI-driven art and media installations that convert data into immersive visual environments. His work has been featured at iconic landmarks and festivals worldwide, from the Walt Disney Concert hall in Los Angeles to the San Pompidou in Paris and Art Basel. His next big project is Dataland, the world's first dedicated AI art museum. Set to open in LA later this year. Joining us to share how he is using AI to expand the possibilities of human creativity and perception. Please welcome artist and director Rafik Anatol. Now Rafik will be here with us here virtually. Rafik, can you hear us? Yes, I can hear you. Hello, good evening from Los Angeles. All right, wonderful. Shall I let you take it away? Please, thank you very much. So, good evening, everyone. I'm excited to be connected with you. I would like to share my journey with you and happy to get some dialogue. I hope you can see my screen. All right. So, Give me 1 2nd, just 1 2nd. I want to do one more sharing technique to be sure you hear this sound and Here we go. All right. So, Again, good evening everyone. I'm so happy to be connected with you. I'm a media artist and director, and I would like to share my journey and key points that transform our work. Um I am at the moment working as a studio with my partner Epson. We are a wonderful group of people, 20 people in Los Angeles, and can speak 15 languages and 10 countries. And the journey for me started almost. 2008 when I coined the term data painting, the idea was when I saw the very first time, the first, I would say, data pigmentation moment in my journey, I couldn't forget the feeling of what will happen if data becomes a pigment, a pigment that doesn't dry, a pigment doesn't have any physical like constraints, that is always changing, always in flux and transforming build environments. In our work, one of the common patterns that you will see is our conversation between art, science, and technology, AI neuroscience and architecture, but most importantly, humans, machines, and environments are always coming together to create an exciting new form of art. And our work is generally is not only stuck in the gallery or a museum, but a place anywhere art can survive, meaning to bring inspiration, it can be in a school in a university, to bring hope, it can be in a hospital. And over the years we worked with incredible partners and I think one of the reasons I moved from Istanbul to Los Angeles to get my second MFA degree at UCLA allowed me to like practice. Mediums very early. I mean now I t for 10 years creating these art forms and artworks across the world, and I'm happy to say that this form of art is, I think, one of the things that I believe will be an inspiring part of creating value and digital art transformation and also transforming the idea of art for anyone, everyone, and pretty much any culture. And as you can see, the work is embedding media arts into architecture, meaning that it can be in any built environment. The floor, the ceiling, and every form of like space can transform into art. And I think that's the type of like world that I've been dreaming since my childhood. This work you are seeing here, 350 Miss Salesforce Building 2014 was the first time I was able to create this space, and over the years that took off and met with many pioneers and I would like to share some stories around them. 2015 for me was a very important time. That was my very first time start becoming the artist in residence at Google's AI program. What you see next to me is also Mike Taika. He's a wonderful person, my first, I will say, mentor, and on the, on our side, you are seeing the machine, I guess the the the the. The Dream, the software originated in a deep convolutional network code named Inception after the film of the same name. It was developed for the ImageNett Large-scale Digital Recognition Challenge in 2014 and released in July 2015, meaning it was the first time an AI output was visualized in a form of human recognition. And that's when I started this idea of a machine hallucinations. The question was if a machine can learn, can it dream, can it hallucinate? And it's, by the way, not for me new, but it's generally like the idea that artists, as we are always asking the question what is beyond reality? And I believe that AI is an incredible tool to think about this question and think about how we can push forward this idea. And the first project for me with AI. About 2016 Library of feature inspired and the project was called Archive Dreaming. As far as I know, this is the very first exhibition using AI in real time and 2016 and 2017, this exhibition was our first application and and again not on physical but also in the virtual world and transformed the idea of 1.7 million documents into a living library. And back on time, it was the first time I started experimenting what an AI dream could look like. And on the left side you are seeing an AI model train on the 1.7 million documents and on the right side me transporting that data into a kind of a data pigmentation or AI data pigments. And as Cargan mentioned, the man will When curiosity world that never were, but without it we go nowhere. As Carl Sagan mentioned, I was super inspired by the possibility of machine learning algorithms, and I'm calling these AI data universes, the idea of sculpting with intelligence. To me these are also sculptures which I'm calling them AI data sculptures. So what you are seeing here. From Rumi's pretty much like Persian poems like a poets me name me in 19 language, or you can see Mozart, every single music Mozart ever created. So if I look at them, I don't see just AI data plottings, but I see them three dimensional, even six dimensional, X, Y, Z, RGB coordinates, applied, machine learning algorithms recognizing this data, and, and truly human-machine collaboration. And the other topic I'm super inspired is the idea of embedding AI into architecture, dreaming the future of architecture. Here you can see our early work, 2017 and 2018 and Miss Hallucination NYC 1.13 million images of New York transforming into these environments, which is later transported into like a three dimensional environment. And again, 2018 was very early years of using AI and. environments and this became a body of work for our studio. We have been creating immersive environments more than 14 years, but the idea behind it like truly understand three dimensional imagination of going beyond two dimensional world of imagination. And the other works that I'm super inspired is the idea of using media facades, which is very much played on our inspired projects. I've been lucky to work with Frank Gehry, Hadi Gaudi. Maybe you may remember this project from 2 years ago in Barcelona. We transformed the Casabao, the Gaudi's incredible building by using real-time weather data and real-time weather application systems. We were able to create the building into a living architecture, meaning the wind data, the weather conditions like the wind and the humidity was transforming the building. And what was really special to me in this project was the idea of giving, like giving this life to a building through like data and AI and and giving this new conscious context to a building, transporting the facade into like a living surface was truly a very long time a dream. And I do believe that if we go beyond concrete, steel and glass, if we use light as a material, if you blend light with AI, I do believe that we we can invent new worlds of imagination. And this is this is like an obsession for more than 16 years, but I love this idea of still like it doesn't get to me repetitive or old because every building, every data, every AI, and every surface is unique and can be fascinating to experiment this. And most importantly, this brings people together. I mean, as you can see, 65,000 people came to our performance and The other project that I'm super excited about is 2 years ago I was the opening artist for this fair in Las Vegas. So what you are seeing is our iconic AI data sculptures and paintings transforming into the world's largest data sculpture in Las Vegas, fascinating pioneering work that I think that the the buildings are incredible, and we are excited and honored for our collector Jim Dolan and The entire sphere team allowed us to like create this artwork and on the other hand, I believe the most important moment for our studio happened also almost 2.5 years ago when the incredible team at MoMA, our creators Micao and Paolo Antonelli, invited us to think about an artwork for musical modern arts called Unsupervis. And by the way, what is amazing about this project is for 9 years ago, MoMA, one of the most important museums in the world, put their 200,000 almost artworks in their collection into GitHub, which was an open source data. And the question was, how can we treat the AI model and transform this into a new language, a new form of art inspired by all the pioneers in the history of MoMA. But instead of this AI transforming into a very realistic another AI, what will happen if you just create this unsupervised artwork, meaning what happens if we transcode the data into a kind of a living pigment, and to make it happen more unique and more transformative and innovative, we use a camera. and a microphone and a weather station as you can see here and also a real-time application meaning we were able to demystify every single mission decisions, meaning every day the artworks was unique and different and we also show exactly people what AI is dreaming from which clusters and which parameter is improving, which what part for it. It was absolutely demystified experience. And to be more clear and again thanks to our media friends and especially Jason Huang, there's two AI. Computers. One is on the left is computing AI dreams. The other mission on the right is me as an artist taking that data, transcoding into this real-time pigmentation, meaning it's a truly AI and human collaboration. So there's no lazy, there's no shortcut, there is truly an ethical data transcoding into a form of art, and the result was a media ball that is transforming every single day into a new form of art. The reaction was something exceptional. The artwork was only open for 3 months, extended 4 times to 1 year, and most importantly, we received around 3 million people, one of the largest audience in the MoMA history. And the average viewing experience was 38 minutes, which is a fascinating number if you think about the artworks and how much people spend time in the museum, and it was a fascinating to me a breaking mold points and how the new form of art, new form of imagination can transcode the entire. Information age and and make the audience become a part of the experience itself. And also because of that we start this extraordinary research and the exordinary impact of our work and and a new AI paper coming soon and you will be able to understand what exactly is happening in our mind when this work is happen. So transforming this work to this, and of course much bigger ns I guess is this artwork also went to the permanent collection of MoMA, which was an incredible moment and honor not only to me but also all the artists working in the field. This was a moment to give a positive signal that this is an art form accepted by the art world. And also this was not only just New York, but we found that this impact was almost everywhere in our exhibitions where the impact was significant. And from there we thought with my partner Epson what could be our contribution in our lifetime to this medium and this practice bringing art, science, and technology AI to the edge of imagination and how can we do it ethical and sustainable. That's when this last September we announced our AI museum called Datalands. It is opening hopefully in Los Angeles and the announcements are coming soon. And what Eland is a very unique form of institution. First of all, when we announced Etaland, I wasn't expecting such an incredible like audience and responses and I'm happy to say that the reaction was extraordinary. I think opening the first AI museum in the world was like something that I couldn't expect like this level of positive impact. The project is not starting as just another, I guess immersive environments or something like that. We've very much focused on our context and meaning and discourse, meaning we want to open the museum by the world's first AI model dedicated to nature, which I'm calling it larger nature model. What makes the AI model different or AI system different is we start by permission. We ask incredible people from across. The world, these are our data partners and also incredibly honored for Google and Nvidia friends giving us their support. We created the first AI system, I believe, the most advanced AI system about nature. And to be more precise, we have an incredible amount of data. We receive 5 billion images and on top of that, we are traveling 16 different rainforests and recording our own data. At the moment, the entire system is running on Google Cloud and a sustainable energy, meaning we are not harming nature when we use this AI system. And here are some results from AI models in collaboration with Black Forest. These are like our first image model resort transformation. And also last year we had an incredible chance to again work with JSson Huang and the wonderful people at NIDA again for almost 9 years with NIDA with a very close relationship, but most importantly, last GT. See thanks to Janson Huang and of course his wonderful team. We were able to transform before his keynotes. You can see me on the main stage, which I'm real time transforming L&M larger model into a real-time application in 16K resolution in real time. So what we are seeing here is, I think, an extraordinary transformation of art. What we are seeing here is a true collaboration between artists and the technology partners, but we are truly crafting a new form of art. And by the way, at Data lens, you will be able to enter this space. You will be able to see as incredibly complex. Transformation you can imagine and also what is exciting is you will be able to smell and hear this AI model. So that's where I am as an artist and I'm happy to hear some questions and I hope that uh to bring dataland experience around the world, and I'm excited to share more. So thank you very much for listening. Rafik, thank you so much. Yes. Uh, as a resident of Los Angeles County, I'm really looking forward to visiting Dataland, so I can't wait. I just have one question for you before we let you go, and that is, um, you have likened AI to pigment in paint. You have also likened it to a collaborator that dreams. Is AI a tool for you or a collaboration, a co-artist? So I think it's a great question. For me, AI is more than a tool because if I say AI tool, I feel like we are underestimating the power of this technology. I do believe AI is completely changing the human history, and I, I, that's why I'm calling it as a force, a force that I can blend with good, a force I can blend with. Creative becomes a creative force, and that force is enhancing my mind, my soul, my spirituality, my emotions, my imagination. I see that as a co-creator, I'll do as your second part, but I see a little bit kind of a force that is very powerful that we have to understand and be sure. And I also say that if AI means. Anything and everything. I just believe that we have to be sure it is for anyone and everyone. Fantastic. One more round of applause for Rafik and Nadol. Thank you. Thank you so much. See you very soon.