Refik Anadol

Refik Anadol (born 1985 in Istanbul) is a Turkish-American media artist, UCLA lecturer, and co-founder of Refik Anadol Studio in Los Angeles, where a team of designers and researchers builds immersive “data paintings” from massive datasets. He has spent his career arguing that machine intelligence is a genuine artistic medium — data the pigment, the neural network a “thinking brush.”

From MoMA to the Sphere

His 2022 installation Unsupervised trained a model on the public metadata of MoMA’s collection and let it “dream” new possibilities of modern art in real time across a gallery-scale screen. More than three million people saw it, making it one of the museum’s most popular exhibitions ever, and MoMA acquired the work for its permanent collection. In 2023 his Machine Hallucinations series ran across the exterior of the Las Vegas Sphere — arguably the largest canvas any AI artwork has occupied.

Anadol is now institutionalizing the movement: Dataland, billed as the world’s first museum of AI arts, opens in Frank Gehry’s Grand LA complex, built around his studio’s Large Nature Model trained on ethically sourced imagery of the natural world. TIME named him among its 100 most influential people in AI.

The acclaim has vocal dissenters. Artnet critic Ben Davis famously dubbed Unsupervised “an extremely intelligent lava lamp,” and others argue the work is spectacle that flatters its tech patrons rather than interrogating them. Anadol shrugs the criticism off, pointing to the crowds — and to a practice built on public data, consenting collaborators, and institutional partnership rather than scraped art.