To Refik Anadol, Criticism Is Just More Data

Only two out of 24 critics expressed negative opinions about his work Unsupervised at MoMA New York, he says. What will they make of his new work inspired by composer Antonín Dvořák?

Refik Anadol has a message for Vulture art critic Jerry Saltz.

'Yo, Jerry, open the gates!'

Saltz dismissed Anadol's incredibly popular work Unsupervised (2022) at MoMA in New York as 'a narcotic pudding' when he reviewed it in February.

Saltz said Unsupervised, which used an algorithm trained on images from MoMA's vast collection to create a giant video wall of machine-imagined art, 'struggles to transcend its source material'.

'But that's the idea!' Anadol protested in a video call from his studio in Los Angeles. 'That is exactly the idea—to never, ever show the source material.'

'We spent one year exactly to not create another mimicry of a Monet or a van Gogh,' he said. 'We were trying to find new patterns, forms, colours, and textures that are not on that visible level.'

Anadol quoted the high satisfaction rate of visitors who saw the work, noted that its run was extended four times, and mentioned that 22 out of 24 critics gave favourable reviews of Unsupervised—a quantitative response to a qualitative opinion.

'Of course, I quantify everything!,' Anadol said. 'I work with data.'

He said Saltz's appraisal lacked an understanding of AI and ultimately constituted art world gatekeeping.

'I'm an outlier. I don't have any gallery representation. I'm not coming from a classical art education,' he said.

Born in Istanbul in 1985, Anadol moved to California to complete an MFA at UCLA's Department of Design Media Arts, where he continues to teach. Catching the wave of interest in digital art during the NFT boom, Anadol's studio has raised more than U.S. $8 million dollars selling artworks that have mesmerised audiences around the world.

While he is not represented by a gallery, Anadol has been embraced by institutions including Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria—who commissioned Quantum memories (2020), which used 200 million photos of Earth to generate machine perceptions of nature—and Istanbul's Pilevneli Gallery, where he created data paintings generated from brain scans, work inspired by his uncle's diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease for the exhibition Melting Memories.

One of Refik Anadol Studio's most technically impressive works to date is Living Architecture: Casa Batlló (2023), a generative work projection-mapped onto Antoni Gaudí's geometrically complex Casa Batlló, known in Barcelona as Casa dels Ossos (House of Bones).

Anadol described the project as 'insanely challenging', but because Casa Batlló is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, 'we were able to use the original, multibillion point, incredible 3D-scan of the original facade.'

The work used around 1 billion images, including Gaudi's sketches, archives of the building's history, tourist snapshots scraped from social media, and climate data to create what Anadol described as 'what the building is feeling'.

More data points: some 65,000 people gathered in front of the building on just one of the nights it was displayed; people came to hug the building, according to Anadol.

The Studio researched Gaudi's life and work for over a year before creating Living Architecture, and they're diving just as deep—'deep dive' is one of the artist's favourite phrases—for an upcoming project to commemorate the life of Czech composer Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904).

The 10 x 10 metre LED media wall DVOŘÁK DREAMS (2023) was commissioned by The 0xCollection (pronounced Hex Collection) to coincide with the Dvořák Prague International Music Festival 2023 (7–25 September 2023). It will be unveiled in front of the city's Rudolfinum concert hall on 8 September.

The work is divided into four chapters using different data sets: portraits of the composer, images of the nature that inspired him, images of cities where he lived such as Prague and New York, and Dvořák's 54 hours of music compositions.

DVOŘÁK DREAMS seeks to reanimate the composer, imagining him alive and performing in Prague. It will include AI-generated music that Anadol said bears a clear resemblance to Dvorak's work, but is still 'a human-machine collaboration'.

'We have a human and his legacy, and we have an AI that can learn from it. And then another human comes into the game and says, can I reinterpret his genius?'

And then, of course, comes another layer of interpretation. Audiences and critics will interpret the merits of the work. Inevitably, some will like it and some will not.

Anadol's discipline of diving as deep as possible is the fullest expression of his chosen medium, but it doesn't necessarily lead to a more aesthetically or emotionally resonant artwork than a smaller set of well chosen data—even just one person's subjective experience.

He says he is 'in love with fluid dynamics', in part because he sees 'data as a pigment that is in flow'. But the liquid quality of many of his works is another artistic choice that people may or may not enjoy. (As well as calling it pudding, Saltz described Unsupervised as 'a massive techno lava lamp'. Others were awestruck.)

That's unavoidable. Nevertheless, Anadol is one of the most accomplished people holding the data paintbrush in the midst of a data and AI revolution that is upturning things left and right, for better and worse.

Many people feel anxious about the AI-powered, Big Data future—concerns that feel warranted in a present where the tech industry has already displaced jobs and accelerated income inequality, with spillover impacts on housing, health, and crime. Undoubtedly, Refik Anadol Studio could create powerful visualisations of these dynamics if they chose to.

'The world has so many problems—wars, separations, conflicts and beyond,' Anadol acknowledges, but he prefers to focus on the positive.

'How I can bring more inspiration, joy, and hope is my ultimate imagination,' he said.

Two weeks ago, the Studio made an artwork to raise funds for the Amazon's indigenous Yawanawá people. They raised $3 million dollars to build a museum, a school, and a village.

'That, to me, is an action, That's tangible. Not just talking,' Anadol said. —[O]