For Artist Refik Anadol, data is not just information. It is pigment. He feeds weather records, river flows, forests and archives into custom AI models and treats the outputs as brushstrokes. The point is to let AI learn from our memories and then push beyond them, catching the moments when the machine’s vision glitches out and creates something truly novel.In this episode, Anadol talks Claire Web, the head of the Berggruen Institute’s Future Humans program, about how this collaboration has changed his sense of nature, authorship, and the edges of reality. They explore how training a model on the textures of rainforests, rivers, and archives can produce a visual language that feels both familiar and strange, and why the future of art may depend less on controlling a system than on listening to where it leads.

Resources

Blade Runner – (Film, 1982)

The Poetics of Augmented Space  — Lev Manovich (Essay, 2006)

TED Talk Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality — Anil Seth (Talk, April 2017)

Large Nature Model — Refik Anadol Studio (AI Model, ongoing)

Refik Anadol

https://refikanadol.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/refik-anadol-studio/

https://www.instagram.com/refikanadol/?hl=en

https://dataland.art/?utm_source

https://refikanadolstudio.com/

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Credits 

Executive Producers: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Nils Gilman, Dawn Nakagawa, and Jason Hoch.

Producers: Grant Slater, Alex Gardels, and Nathalia Ramos.

Associate Producer: Elissa Mardiney

Theme Music: Marcus Bagala.

Audio Engineer: Aaron Bastinelli

Futurology is a production of Studio B and Wavland and distributed by Realm.