Refik Anadol

So this is actually an ongoing exhibit right now at the MoMA in New York.

It's by an artist named Rafiq Anadol.

It's called Unsupervised, which is the name of his collection.

And I think Rafiq, I believe, is the first crypto artist to be featured in MoMA.

It's derivative, right? Like it's not necessarily new.

Obviously, there is Rafiq Anadol, who has really cool installation.

It was in our lobby two, three years ago, who now opened his own, I think, museum in LA that's all around AI art.

But it's a hard line to walk.

This is not about just offline things.

And I don't know if you've ever seen a Refik Anadol installation where he's taking, you know, large language models and combining them with nature and giving you these digital experiences where nature roils out of a screen towards you like a huge wave.

That can bring you awe too.

And he just opened a museum in Los Angeles that I'm really excited to go see at some point because, you know, that awe is something that makes you think that life is really worth living

It's a continuously changing audiovisual artwork generated entirely by a machine learning model.

Yet, MoMA attributes the artwork to Refik Anadol in his studio.

Even though the machine generated the actual visuals.

Yeah, because he created the conceptual framework.

[upbeat music] Hi there.

This week on About Art, I speak with artist Refik Anadol.

Refik is a media artist whose work explores the creative possibilities of data and machine learning.

For more than a decade, he has used archives of images, sounds, and information to create immersive installations, data paintings, and sculptures that ask us to reconsider the boundaries between human and machine creativity.

I went there yesterday, and we'll talk about it today.

In our conversation, we discuss memory, imagination, nature, technology, authorship, and what happens when an artist begins to think of a machine as a creative collaborator.

Here's my conversation with Refik Anadol.

I guess I'd like to start off by asking you to talk a little bit about data and the fact that you describe data as a, as a material in almost the way a painter might describe paint or a sculptor might describe clay.

With Fair Play, he's asking those questions again from the beginning.

Next week, I'll be speaking with artist Refik Anadol about memory, imagination, nature, artificial intelligence, and what happens when an artist begins to think of a machine as a creative collaborator.

If you enjoyed this episode, as always, please subscribe to About Art, share it with someone who you think would appreciate it, and leave us a review.

Thank you, as always, for listening.

And I think part of it is there are so many artists who use AI in compelling ways.

I think about the video artist Rafiq Anadol who creates these artworks from deep data sets.

And I was at Crystal Bridges a couple of weeks ago to see the museum and there was one of Rafiq Anadol's installations.

Artists and AI are creating unique and singular works of art.

But people were excited about it because artists were talking about it.

Refik Anadol was involved in early AI, and still is.

He was also involved in the other thing, NFTs, I think.

Beeple was the poster boy of NFTs.