Refik Anadol

Portrait photo of a person in front of a blue background.

Refik Anadol

Biography

Refik Anadolis (*1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is an internationally renowned media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. He is the Director and co-founder of Refik Anadol Studio in Los Angeles and teaches at UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts from which he obtained a Master of Fine Arts. Refik Anadol Studio brings together a globally diverse team of designers, architects, data scientists, and researchers – originating from 10 countries and fluent in 15 languages – who share a deep commitment to inclusion, equity, and cross-cultural collaboration at every stage of artistic production. Anadol is also the co-founder of Dataland, the world’s first Museum of AI Arts.

Anadol’s work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. Taking the data that surrounds us as primary material, and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol offers us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expands the possibilities of interdisciplinary arts. Anadol’s AI data paintings and sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, public art, decentralized networks, and the creative potential of machines.

Anadol’s work has been exhibited at venues including MoMA, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Guggenheim Bilbao, Serpentine Galleries, National Gallery of Victoria, Venice Architecture Biennale, Hammer Museum, Arken Museum, Casa Batlló, Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Daejeon Museum of Art, Istanbul Modern, and ZKM | Karlsruhe. Anadol has received a number of awards and prizes including TIME 100 AI Impact Award, UCLA’s 2024 Edward A. Dickinson Alumnus of the Year Award, the Lorenzo il Magnifico Lifetime Achievement Award for New Media Art, Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency Award, Microsoft Research’s Best Vision Award, iF Gold Award, D&AD Pencil Award, German Design Award, UCLA Art+Architecture Moss Award, Columbia University’s Breakthrough in Storytelling Award, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Award, and SEGD Global Design Award.