Inside the Collection: Refik Anadol | Synthetic Dreams – Landscapes (2021) & Winds of Yawanawá (2023)

Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is a pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence.  He uses AI to transform real-world data into evocative, multi-sensorial works of art, and in doing so, he redefines the relationship between technology, art, and the natural world. In this inaugural installment of Hivemind’s "Inside the Collection" series, we explore Anadol’s innovative work, particularly the two series represented in our collection:  Synthetic Dreams – Landscapes (2021) and Winds of Yawanawá (2023).

Refik Anadol: Defining Data Painting

Anadol is a media artist of international renown. He holds two MFAs: one from Bilgi University in his native Istanbul, Turkey, and another from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is the Director and co-founder of Refik Anadol Studio in LA, and he teaches in the Department of Design Media Arts at UCLA . First and foremost, though, he is a prolific artist devoted to exploring the intersection of technology and creativity. Per his website, Anadol’s work “addresses the challenges, and the possibilities, that ubiquitous computing has imposed on humanity, and what it means to be a human in the age of AI.”  His work is genre-bending, if not genre-defining. He brings together real-world data, machine intelligence, and visual art in radical ways to explore the changing nature of human perception and experience in the context of 21st-century technology. In a recent conversation with Hivemind, Anadol explained that he carefully selects the data he uses in each of his projects—always to convey a powerful message or elicit a powerful feeling, whether that be “hope, joy, or inspiration.”

Central to Anadol’s work is the monumental scale of his data sets and installations. He takes vast swathes of data that were once intangible, and he creates immersive, large-scale “data paintings” (a phrase he coined in 2008) that overwhelm the entire sensorium. These data paintings are often installed in public spaces, where they can be experienced collectively. Among these public spaces are significant cultural landmarks worldwide—such as Casa Batlló in Barcelona, La Biennale in Venice, Sphere in Las Vegas, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Anadol's Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations — MoMA (2022) was the centerpiece of MoMA’s lobby for nearly a year before it was acquired by the museum (figure 1). Displayed on a 24-foot-high wall of LED lights, it is an ever-changing series of vibrant, undulating forms, some of which are entirely abstracted and some of which verge on the figurative. It is produced by a machine-learning model that processes 138,151 pieces of metadata from MoMA’s collection. The resulting animation conjures a wide range of art historical references, from the gestural splatters of Jackson Pollock to the organic shapes of Georgia O’Keeffe to the biomorphic distortions of Francis Bacon. This generative “hallucination” is the 21st-century version of a Surrealist dreamscape, built on centuries of art history. The result, however, is anything but derivative. Each frame is unique and original, expressed in a distinctive style that is unmistakably Anadol.

Synthetic Dreams (2021): Groundbreaking Technology

A year before he produced his seminal Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations — MoMA, Anadol utilized innovative generative technology to create a series he has identified as one of his most historically important yet widely overlooked: Synthetic Dreams — Landscapes (2021).  This “hidden gem” of a series comprises 1,000 unique data paintings, 12 of which are in the collection of Hivemind’s Digital Culture Fund. To produce Synthetic Dreams, Anadol used a GAN machine learning algorithm that he had developed while producing the series Quantum Memories (2021)^[i].  He combined that algorithm with quantum bit strings generated by the Google Quantum AI team’s “beyond classical experiment,” and the result was historic: the first-ever NFT collection to utilize Google Quantum AI computational datasets, wherein each data painting is computed with a unique quantum bit string.

Despite the sophisticated, somewhat esoteric technology behind this series, the resulting data paintings are grounded in natural forms, earthy tones, and a tactile all-over surface texture. The raw data a t the heart of the project is a set of 200 million photographs of landscapes from around the world, including from all the national parks in the United States. Indeed, the series is far more figurative than much of Anadol’s work. Whereas some data paintings in the series are relatively abstract, others are such literal representations of the source photographs that the landscapes they depict are recognizable. For example, one of the data paintings in Hivemind’s Digital Culture Fund collection resembles the Grand Canyon, while another loosely resembles Mount Rushmore (figures 2 and 3). Furthermore, the web-like pattern of fine lines across the data paintings recalls the visual effect of sketching, incising, or etching in traditional art. In this way, the Synthetic Dreams series exists at the nexus of familiar materiality, cutting-edge technology, and the unfettered natural world. In Anadol’s words, this nuanced body of work pays “homage to the Earth's unbounded poetic sublimity.” The themes Anadol explored in this series—the dreamscape, the sublimity of nature, the creative potential of technology, and the changing nature of perception in the 21st century—are the same themes that play out in his later work, such as Winds of Yawanawá (2023), and that continue to take shape in his work today.

Winds of Yawanawá (2023): Innovation with Purpose

In 2023, Anadol collaborated with the Yawanawá   people of the Amazon Rainforest to produce one of his most significant contributions to the world of digital art: Winds of Yawanawá. Of the 1,000 unique data paintings in this series, 40  are in the collection of Hivemind’s Digital Culture Fund. In a recent conversation with Hivemind, Anadol described this as his most meaningful NFT project to date.  The series is the first of its kind and was commissioned by Impact One’s Possible Futures program, which aims to reconnect culture and nature toward a more integrative approach to sustainability. Anadol has articulated that if society is to harness emergent technologies like AI for environmental guardianship: “We need collective wisdom; and if you think about collective wisdom, you will need ancestral wisdom.” To this end, Anadol collaborated closely on this project with Yawanawá chiefs from the Aldeia Sagrada and Nova Esperança communities. Like many Indigenous groups, the Yawanawá people are profoundly connected to the natural world, particularly to their ancestral land. Numbering over 1,200, they live primarily in villages along the banks of the Gregório River, which runs through the Amazon in the western Brazilian state of Acre.

Winds of Yawanawá merges the work of two young Yawanawá artists with weather data from the sacred Yawanawá village of Aldeia Sagrada. While this project is tied directly to their  specific identities and experiences, it also speaks to something universal. Not only is the Amazon ecosystem fundamental to all of humanity, but the nexus of technology, nature, and creativity is crucial for building a sustainable future on a global scale. Winds of Yawanawá is uniquely positioned at this nexus. The core of the project is a vast amount of weather data that includes wind speed (from tempestuous to tranquil), temperature (from freezing to scorching), and origin (from star, or ishti, to flower, or uwa). This data manifests in a truly dynamic and diverse set of visual traits, which borrow from the imagery of the young Yawanawá artists, and which are expressed in Anadol’s signature undulating cubical and spherical digital pigments . Every data painting is a 60-second loop accompanied by one of four generative soundtracks. The result is a series of 1,000 unique and engaging works, each deeply connected to the natural world from which it originates and to the broader mission of sustainability for which they collectively stand. Through this series, Anadol pays homage to the relationship between individual creativity, collective culture, and the natural world, integrating the historic practices of Indigenous people with contemporary data and technologies.

In addition to the 1,000 data paintings, Anadol produced three large-scale data sculptures as part of his Winds of Yawanawá project. These data sculptures are 8-minute loops and can be experienced in a more collective and immersive manner than the data paintings. In July 2023, Anadol launched Winds of Yawanawá at an event in Mykonos, Greece (figure 4). At the center of this event was a data sculpture on the beach, framed by palm trees and lit by the setting sun. The mesmerizing colors, movement, and scale of the sculpture were accompanied by the sounds of nature and Yawanawá musicians. Months later, in January 2024, Winds of Yawanawá was given a place of honor at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (figure 5). The data paintings were displayed on a large scale around the perimeter of the space, creating an immersive experience that was accompanied by performances—by Yawanawá Chiefs Nixiwaka, Putanny, and Isku Kua, as well as by international musicians Angelique Kidjo, Ibrahim Maalouf, and Will Santt. The immersive nature of these installations is characteristic of Anadol. Critical to his practice is “intermediality,” or the intersection of different artistic media and modes of communication. In Winds of Yawanawá, Anadol’s moving images are accompanied by soundtracks, and their digital nature coexists with the natural world from which they derive and the physical environments in which they are displayed. Intermediality enables Anadol to attend to the whole human sensorium and command attention, so that the viewer must be present to their environment and time. The combination of media—visual, auditory, tactile—has a more profound effect than the sum of its parts.

Intermediality has been a popular tool in ecological art for decades. In 1970, for example, the American sculptor Robert Smithson created his seminal earthwork sculpture Spiral Jetty in Utah (figure 6). Spiral Jetty is an immersive, living sculpture that constantly evolves due to environmental conditions: season, weather, water level, human intervention, and the effects on each of these by climate change. Over thirty years later, in 2003, the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson created his immersive The Weather Project at Tate Modern in London (figure 7). Using light and water, amplified by visual illusions, Eliasson simulated a glowing sun and heavy mist within the Tate Modern lobby. By recreating the tactile experience of the outside weather inside the museum, he brought the environment to the fore of the viewer’s attention. Anadol builds upon this ongoing artistic tradition in ecological art, uniting it with the cultural heritage of the Yawanawá people and the technology of the 21st century to create something entirely new: a radical call for sustainability.

This message is not just a symbolic one. The proceeds from the sale of works from the Winds of Yawanawá series go directly to Instituto Nixiwaka, which supports a range of sustainability initiatives in the Aldeia Sagrada and Nova Esperança villages that help preserve their natural landscape and cultural heritage. Among these initiatives are building sustainable infrastructure in Aldeia Sagrada and establishing an educational program in Nova Esperança. Numerous industry professionals and journalists have applauded this new compensation model for what it indicates about the future of environmental protection: the increased autonomy of communities who are stewards of and advocates for the land.

Conclusion

Anadol’s body of work, including Synthetic Dreams (2021) and Winds of Yawanawá (2023), has set a hopeful tone for reimagining humans’ relationship with the natural world, as well as the role of technology in mediating that relationship. Hivemind’s Digital Culture Fund is proud to include 12 works from Synthetic Dreams and 40 from Winds of Yawanawá in our collection. Together, these works represent the “AI and data painting” chapter of the digital art movement as represented in our collection. You can view that collection here.

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^[i] A Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is an artificial intelligence modeling technique designed to generate new, previously unseen data by placing two neural networks in a contest with each other. One agent acts as the Generator, creating new outputs from randomness and prior learnings. The other agent takes the role of the Discriminator and evaluates the Generator’s output, distinguishing real data from the generated content. The duel between Generator and Discriminator drives a GAN’s improvement. GANs don’t replace human creativity; they amplify it. Artists guide the process, curate the training data, and infuse their vision into the generated output. It is a beautiful collaboration between humans and machines, resulting in art that surprises, challenges, and inspires.