Boz to the Future Episode 20: The Future According to Refik Anadol

Welcome back for another episode of Boz To The Future, a podcast from Reality Labs. In today’s episode, our host, Meta CTO and Head of Reality Labs Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, is joined by internationally renowned media artist and director Refik Anadol.

Anadol is a pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. He’s been creating with algorithms since 2008, with projection mapping on an architectural scale since 2010, and in virtual reality since the days of the first Oculus developer kit in 2013. His work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines and uses the massive datasets around us as his primary material, with the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator. Giving people radical visualizations of collective, digitized memories, his groundbreaking interpretations of data have garnered numerous awards. Millions of people have been drawn to his exhibits that generate new forms in real time.

He’s partnered with teams at Microsoft, Google, NVIDIA, Apple, Intel, IBM, NASA/JPL, Siemens, Epson, MIT, UCLA, Harvard University, Imperial College, Stanford University, and UCSF to apply the latest, cutting-edge science, research, and technologies to his work. His studio is made up of designers, architects, data scientists, and researchers from diverse professional and personal backgrounds.

Together, Anadol and Bosworth explore Anadol’s long-held concept of data as a pigment. He sees it as an artistic substance that he deftly manipulates to create rich visualizations of the world around us. Anadol talks about finding inspiration in various branches of science, digging deep into large datasets and interpreting them into a living form of art that has resonated with millions of people. “I truly believe in emotions,” Anadol says, “and our work is fundamentally for anyone—any age and any background. And I’m really trying my best to find what can bring inspiration, joy, and hope.”

The pair touch on Anadol’s Unsupervised exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which drew 3 million visitors with an average viewing time of 38 minutes. They also discuss the use of architecture as a canvas. “When we transform the façade of a Frank Gehry, or a Zaha Hadid, or an Antoni Gaudí,” Anadol says, “I believe that there is so much fun and so many possibilities when we think beyond concrete, glass, and steel. And when we think about light and data and AI as a material, then the rooms and the façades, the walls, the ceiling all become a canvas.”

In fact, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao commissioned Anadol’s studio to design an inspiring new artform, and they settled on an homage to Gehry. “We decided to honor Frank Gehry’s life because we love him so much and respect him,” Anadol says. This isn’t the first time his work has touched on Gehry’s—in 2018, he helped celebrate the LA Phil’s 100th anniversary with WDCH Dreams, a series of projections on the exterior of the Walt Disney Concert Hall informed by 45 terabytes of data from the LA Phil’s archives encompassing 40,000 hours of audio from 16,471 performances.

Anadol’s studio trains their own models, leveraging Meta’s open source Llama collection of models in the process. “We’re fine-tuning all the text models and learning a lot,” he says. “Your open source movement is so important—like, so essential. I do not believe we can have a breakthrough in the art because if you think about the complex systems and products and services, they are the breakthroughs, which is amazing. But for artists, we love to break things. We don’t like something real. We allow the fantasies, dreams, you know, glitches. But artists have to take a system that exists and then turn it into the thing that they have a vision for. I have a lot of respect for PyTorch and all that. Open source information is like gold for art making.”

They delve into Large Nature Model, Anadol’s recent project that leverages more than a half billion images of nature collected over four years from partners like the Smithsonian, National Geographic, and others. “Right now, everything is about large language models and about human reasoning, but we thought that perhaps nature is also very important for controlling what happens. What happens if we think, ‘Nature first?’ So we’re fine-tuning Llama now with an amazing nature-focused, rainforest-focused dataset.”

They talk about the immense responsibility that comes from working with these datasets. Anadol not only inspires people with his work, he also brings them along on the process behind the creation because he believes that demystifying the complexities of artificial intelligence will help people better understand and accept it.

“I believe AI is full of possibilities, but possibilities come with responsibilities,” Anadol says. “AI is a mirror for humanity. If we know who we are, I’m very comfortable and confident about AI.”

You can tune in to Boz to the Future on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can follow Anadol on Instagram. You can follow Bosworth on Instagram, Twitter/X, and Threads @boztank.