This post is a semi-transcript of a fantastic talk “Space in the mind of a machine” by media artist Refik Anadol. My post is not intended as a literal transcript, but rather as a collection of – often poetic – idea clusters of Refik’s talk. None of the ideas are mine, I just tried to condense it and brush some highlights.

The talk was given on 4 December 2019 at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC). The website of SCI-ARC itself is nirvana for all beauty and art lovers out there, and worth spending a virtual visit of a couple of hours.

The talk was transformative for me, in the sense that it made me realize we truly have entered a new reality and a witnessing the dawn of a new area, full of beauty, poetry, and artistic interventions that create alertness and aliveness similar to the 16th-century renaissance.

After a long intro, his talk starts at 2:46

 

 

Criticizing the idea of canvas

Dimensional explorations

Augmented structures

“Design is a solution to a problem; art is a question to a problem” – John Maeda

Humans, Machines, and Environments in a symbiotic relationship

Can a building dream?

“Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward” – Kierkegaard

The data that we leave behind us

Data “dramatization” vs. Data Visualisation

The invisible space of Wi-Fi, 4G, radio signals, etc.

A poetic exploration of invisible datasets

Data Paintings

At a certain moment, Refik Anadol quotes Philip K. Dick, author of the 1968 science fiction book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, later retitled Blade Runner, and basis for the 1982 initial version of the film.

This inspires Refik Anadol to seed the following insight:

A simulation is that which does not stop when the stories go away

Stories are responsible for our human desire for resolution

But the simulation is only responsible for its own laws and initializing conditions

A simulation has no moral, prejudice of meaning

Like nature it just is

There is some poetry hidden in this abstraction of data

Exploring data sets that have this quality of meditation

The architect as an operating systems designer, a beautiful “speculation”

Finding the moment of remembering

Finding the moment of entering a dream state

“Machine Hallucinations”

Collective memories of spaces

To make the invisible visible

Hallucination narrators

Dream narrators

The Selfies of the Earth

Refik is asking questions that are not just a fancy-fications of a bunch of algorithms