Artist Refik Anadol on AI futures, public art and The Sphere

Artist Refik Anadol’s unique AI-generated artwork has graced buildings and art spaces around the world over the past several years, from a massive projection on the side of Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles in 2018 to a more recent mesmerizing panel at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

But when he was asked to create a new piece to be displayed on the outside of the new Las Vegas venue The Sphere, the scale increased by tenfold. Anadol calls the venue an engineering marvel.

“It is an incredible space for any creative mind to imagine and go beyond some sort of two-dimensional thinking,” Anadol says. “The feature of the architecture is so much more inspiring than just concrete, steel or glass. I've been dreaming that one day, media data algorithms or this invisible world of machine imagination can become a pigment, can become a surface.”