Refik Anadol, Visions of America: Am riques, 2014. | Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Data is everywhere: we have big data, open data, data sets, data mining, data management, data visualization, data smog, the data deluge, and -- if you can believe it -- being a data scientist was dubbed the sexiest job of the 21st century by Harvard Business Review. We're scolded to manage our data properly, we fret about our data trails and yet, in all this data, it's sometimes hard to find good data. Data shows that data will be increasingly significant in the future. Data equals knowledge equals power. Data dominates.
If all of this sounds dreadful, take heart: the data artist (not celebrated by HBR) rejects the all-too instrumental uses of data, perversely employing it instead in the service of beauty and delight.
Enter Refik Anadol. The bespectacled, black-haired 30-year-old artist has established a bustling studio in Silver Lake dedicated to exploring the creative uses of data in a series of innovative art experiences that are grand. Not only that, the artworks strive to open up a conversation about the city and its complex and dynamic relationship to the people who inhabit it. What can visualizations of our city -- its public transport, weather patterns, water usage and so on -- tell us about who we are and what we're doing?
We have all this data, Anadol says cheerfully, but what does it mean? He answers his own question by musing, I think a new kind of storytelling can occur.
Refik Anadol, Augmented Structures v1.0: Acoustic Formations/Istiklal Street, 2011. | Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Anadol, originally from Turkey, studied a full array of media forms, including video, graphic design and media art, earning both a BA and MFA in the Department of Visual Communication Design at Bilgi University in Istanbul. Deeply influenced by Blade Runner, which he saw at age nine, Anadol became obsessed with the intersection of architecture and media, wondering how he could take his burgeoning skills with media and make an intervention in built space.
To assuage this fixation, he headed outside with a projector and transformed the walls of a building at his university into a sea of movement, seemingly dissolving concrete materiality into fluid waves of images. Online documentation of the project garnered a huge international response. That success led me to do another project in Germany at the SANAA School of Design, Anadol recounts. Titled Quadrangle, the project once again sought to transform physical architecture into imagery. This time, the whole building became the canvas, it was a 360-degree experience. I learned how to use much more customized software to create the visuals, as well as how to create a whole new form of storytelling by using the existing geometry of the building itself in collaboration with SANAA team.
Anadol was subsequently invited to design a large-scale media installation as part of the Istanbul Biennial in 2011, using the city's well-known public mall called Istiklal Street, which is nearly a mile long and is traversed by millions of people. Old-fashioned trolleys travel down the street's center, which is otherwise open only to pedestrians. Anadol captured sound on the street at differing times of the day and night, and then, using nine projectors, presented a massive visual reinterpretation of the sound as a site-specific moving image artwork titled Augmented Structures v1.0. The whole thing is a very dynamic form of sculpture, Anadol says. The sculpture is transformed in real time so every day you see a different quality of storytelling.
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Inspired to push farther, Anadol traveled to Los Angeles and enrolled in the Design Media Arts program at UCLA, where he worked with Casey Reas and other faculty members, earning a second MFA and honing his skills further.
For his thesis project in the program in 2014, Anadol wanted to interact with a major Los Angeles architectural landmark. He selected the Walt Disney Concert Hall, initially imagining that he would transpose a concert happening inside the hall to the building's exterior, projecting imagery onto the already seemingly in-motion surfaces of the building and creating an experience for the city outside. This desire to share an art experience in public space is emblematic of Anadol's temperament: he boasts an infectious enthusiasm and generosity, as well as an almost utopian zeal for what art can lend to our current moment of cultural transformation and emerging sense of literacy related to the impact and role of data today.
However, Anadol's enthusiasm outstripped his abilities at that moment, and he was forced to scale back a bit. He turned instead to the concert hall's interior, wondering how he might engage the space alongside the orchestra during a performance.
Refik Anadol, Visions of America: Am riques, 2014. | Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Esa-Pekka Salonen was super interested in the idea of using the interior somehow as a form, Anadol says. He said, Var se is an important inspiration. What if we took the first piece that he wrote when he arrived in the United States?' The piece Salonen referenced was Am riques, which was written by Var se between 1918 and 1921 while the composer lived in New York City. Var se was interested in playing with what he called zones of intensities, and the resulting 24-minute piece is a raucous, robust composition that engages a very large orchestra with 115 players. Anadol may have had to re-set his ambitions, but not by much.
The building's architect, Frank Gehry, was also enthusiastic about Anadol's proposal and provided the artist with the 3-D models of the hall. It's a very intimate space, continues Anadol, who knew that the intimacy would require precision and care in creating a seamless im
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Refik Anadol, Visions of America: Am riques, 2014. | Photo: Courtesy of the artist. 
