New Media Artist and Designer

Refik Anadol is a media artist and director born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1985. Currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is a lecturer and visiting researcher in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts.

He is working in the fields of site-specific public art with parametric data sculpture approach and live audio/visual performance with immersive installation approach, particularly his works explore the space among digital and physical entities by creating a hybrid relationship between architecture and media arts with machine intelligence. He holds a master of fine arts degree from University of California, Los Angeles in Media Arts, a master of fine arts degree from Istanbul Bilgi University in Visual Communication Design as well as bachelors of arts degree with summa cum laude in Photography and Video.

As a media artist, designer, and spatial thinker, Refik Anadol is intrigued by the ways in which the transformation of the subject of contemporary culture requires rethinking of the new aesthetic, technique, and dynamic perception of space. Anadol builds his works on the nomadic subject’s reaction to and interactions with unconventional spatial orientations with data and machine intelligence. Embedding media arts into architecture, he questions the possibility of a post-digital architectural future in which there are no more non-digital realities. He invites the viewers to visualize alternative realities by presenting them the possibility of redefining the functionalities of both interior and exterior architectural formations. Anadol’s work suggests that all spaces and facades have potentials to be utilized as the media artists’ canvases.

Privileging difference rather than singularity and movement rather than stasis, Anadol faces all the new challenges that the gradual development of an enriched immersive environment and ubiquitous computing impose on architects, media artists, and engineers. How is our experience of space-changing, now that digital objects ranging from smartphones to urban screens have all but colonized our everyday lives? How have media technologies changed our conceptualizations of space, and how has architecture embraced these shifting conceptualizations? These are the three main questions that Anadol tackles by not simply integrating media into built forms, but by translating the logic of a new media technology into spatial design.