Refik Anadol made use of his Opening Keynote in the AV Experience Zone to both thank members of the ISE audience for supplying the tools that helped him get started as a student and challenge them to go further still to support the evolution of creative work like his own.
“I’m honoured to be here with wonderful technology partners who touch my journey, help me, support me, and I’ll try my best to share my appreciation to the field and the people who allow me and my team to make our dreams real,” he said.
His aim was to show AV manufacturers how the products they make can be the tools of imagination and in turn have a profound impact on public spaces.
Anadol is a media artist and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. He established the Los Angeles-based Refik Anadol Studio in 2014 and specialises in producing immersive media art in public spaces.
For example, he is the creator of ‘In the Mind of Gaudí’, a digital artwork inspired by Casa Batlló and its architect, exhibited in the Gaudí Cube, the world’s first six-sided LED-walled room. It shows the different creative capacities of the combination of digital image, big data and artificial intelligence and explores new ways to bring digital art closer to the general public.
For Anadol, data is his primary media. In fact, he pioneered the term data painting as long ago as 2008. He is also constantly integrating the types of products and services that the AV industry is responsible for producing.
As you’d expect, Anadol has a take on the metaverse, and is opening his own project called Dataland in Los Angeles next year. It will be a collaboration with neuroscientists, architects, AI developers and biological scientists.
Here at ISE, he pointed out that these visual experiences are not only for aesthetics, but can be practical in a good way, something he sees as the future of the medium. He is also keen to eliminate gated experiences and instead show more public art to people from all ages and backgrounds.
