Welcome to Luminaries, a weekly deep-dive into the minds moving culture, capital, and code. I’m Matt Medved.

In May, I found myself at the TIME100 Summit rubbing shoulders with a cross-section of the world’s most influential minds — entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, policymakers — all gathered under one roof to reckon with the forces shaping our future. Over coffee and canapés, one founder made a startling admission.

“I use AI in everything I do,” he admitted sheepishly. “Used GPT for my investor update, then realized my board replies were AI-assisted too. I haven’t written something entirely on my own in weeks.”

We laughed, but an uneasy truth hung in the air. AI is no longer an abstraction. It’s deeply embedded in how we work, create, and make decisions. We’re increasingly integrating it into every facet of our lives, often without questioning what it means.

Refik Anadol has spent the last decade asking those questions, and answering them with work that listens as much as it speaks. While many see AI as a tool, he sees it as a collaborator, even a consciousness. His work gives data emotional weight, drawing from nature to alchemize it into art that institutions can no longer afford to ignore.

Over the past year, I’ve sat down with Refik on multiple occasions for a transcontinental conversation of art, ethics, and the museum of the future. What does it mean to create with machines that dream? Let’s find out.

Before we dive in, I’m excited to invite our Premium members to a private Luminaries Salon Q&A with Refik on July 23rd at 1 pm ET. More details coming soon. Not yet a member? Subscribe here to join us.

It’s 4 p.m. at London’s Serpentine Gallery, and Refik Anadol is in flow state.

Dressed in an unassuming black raincoat and chunky boots, the Turkish artist looks more like a systems engineer than a celebrated creative. His eyes stay locked on shifting screens as he weaves between futuristic data panels and LED arrays with the quiet urgency of someone fine-tuning a system that’s still learning how to speak.

He chuckles at the observation and explains that he’s always been hands-on with his work.

“I’m an independent artist. I don’t have a gallery,” he says. “I slept on the floor during [the MoMA] installation.”

It’s a striking contrast for a TIME100 AI Impact Award recipient whose work has been showcased in the rarified air of the World Economic Forum and the United Nations. Behind the futuristic spectacle is someone who insists on staying close to the circuitry, just as invested in the infrastructure as in the ideas it supports.

“I don’t separate them,” he continues. “To be an artist today means being a researcher too. If you’re working with AI, data, and immersive spaces, you have to understand the systems. But the goal isn’t just knowledge. It’s meaning. Art gives that.”

As we walk through the gallery’s shadowed corridors, immersive installations envelop us in an endlessly looping fever dream of abstract flora and fauna. Anadol’s signature “Large Nature Model” breathes quietly around us, a synthetic wilderness dreaming itself into existence. His exhibition, “Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive,” doesn’t depict nature so much as commune with it, rendered not by brush or lens, but by algorithms trained on oceans of environmental data.

“It has a coral aspect and a rainforest aspect,” he explains, voice quickening with excitement. “What you see outside is constantly reconstructing itself in different formats… it’s a living archive. A dreamy AI. That’s the kind of intelligence I want to create. Something surreal. A fantasy world. Sometimes it shows you something hyper-real, sometimes completely imagined. You never know what’s coming next. It’s an AI with imagination.”

The Making of a Machine Poet

Refik Anadol is best understood as an interpreter between humans and machines, translating vast, complex data into visual poetry. Born in Istanbul in 1985 into a family of educators, Anadol was immersed in a culture of learning and curiosity.

“My family had 14 teachers,” he explains. “One uncle was a surgeon who pioneered kidney transplants in Turkey. Every day, we’d get calls from the thousands of people whose lives he saved. My creativity, well-being, being as good as I can be… it all came from these moments in life.”

At eight years old, two experiences shaped his trajectory: receiving his first computer and watching Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner.” The film’s exploration of synthetic perception and human consciousness ignited a fascination that would become his life’s work.

“The idea that a synthetic being could experience memories… it haunted me,” he recalls. “I kept asking, what is real? What is perception? That’s still the core of my work today.”

“The idea that a synthetic being could experience memories… it haunted me.”
REFIK ANADOL

In his early experiments, Anadol taught himself programming on a Commodore 64, captivated by the alternate realities offered by video games. These formative moments planted seeds for a future where technology could reflect human dreams.

“It was love at first sight,” he says. “My room became this playground where imagination and logic collided.”

Anadol pursued his passion at Istanbul Bilgi University, earning degrees in Photography and Video and Visual Communication Design. Yet, seeking deeper fusion between art and technology, he journeyed to the United States to attend UCLA, earning his MFA in Design Media Arts.

“At UCLA, I met Casey Reas and Jennifer Steinkamp, my mentors and heroes,” says Anadol. “I was very lucky. I learned from the best. And I think that helped me become someone who shares, who collaborates. That’s when I stopped thinking of myself as a solo artist.”

Today, Anadol leads a team at Refik Anadol Studio and RAS LAB in LA, working at the vanguard of what he calls “AI data sculptures.” His works are shown in places that rarely speak the same language: MoMA and Davos, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and Burning Man. Yet they remain uncategorizable: not quite cinema, installation, or architecture. “It’s a new medium,” he says. “It evolves. It reacts. It stores. It dreams.”

Unsupervised. Credit: Courtesy of Refik Anadol Studios

From MoMA to Dataland

His breakthrough work, “Unsupervised,” transformed more than 200 years of MoMA’s collection into a perpetually shifting hallucination. It made headlines as the first AI-generated and tokenized piece acquired by the museum. But what made “Unsupervised” resonant was its emotional register: viewers didn’t just look at it, they lingered. Many returned. “The average visitor stayed 13 minutes,” Anadol says. “That’s a lot in a museum.”

The traditional art world treated him differently overnight. Collectors who had once dismissed AI art as a novelty began asking questions. Curators who’d kept a cautious distance now extended invitations. Institutions recalibrated.

“Collectors’ minds changed instantly,” he recalls. “Being in the MoMA collection is one thing, but having a popular piece there is something else. That’s what triggered the dialogue. It validated the medium. Not just for me, but for everyone working in this space. I don’t live by validation, but society does. Opening the door means others can come through.”

“He’s made mundane subjects like brain scans or weather patterns into something aesthetically beautiful, and he’s upheld his market like an asset class.“
ARUSHI KAPOOR

With neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley at UCSF, Anadol conducted brain research around the installation. The findings showed that “Unsupervised” triggered what researchers call a “flow state,” a mode of active, open-ended attention that Anadol understands intimately. “It’s not meditation,” he explains. “It’s daydreaming. High-functioning mind wandering. People described a spiritual connection.”

Art advisor Arushi Kapoor, who has placed Anadol’s works with traditional collectors, says he’s bridged a longstanding divide.

“They understand his work,” she says. “He’s made mundane subjects like brain scans or weather patterns into something aesthetically beautiful, and he’s upheld his market like an asset class.”

That emotional depth is what separates Anadol’s practice from much of the AI-generated art that floods timelines and group chats. His early term “data painting” has become both a philosophy and a formal discipline. “Data is my pigment,” he says. “But the goal isn’t just to visualize it. The goal is to feel it.”

Winds of Yawanawa. Credit: Courtesy of Refik Anadol Studios

If AI is often portrayed as cold and calculating, Anadol’s work insists that it can also be tender, associative, even poetic. Nowhere is that more evident than in his popular “Winds of Yawanawá” collaboration with the Yawanawá, an Indigenous tribe in the Brazilian Amazon.

“They said, ‘Nature is AI for us,’” Anadol recalls. “Why are you shocked? The reason we are shocked is that we’ve detached from nature. We’ve made it ‘other.’ But they live with it. They preserve it.”

The tribe contributed 13 hand-painted works, which Anadol’s studio reimagined through AI. The proceeds helped fund a long-held dream: convening Indigenous leaders from across Amazonia for the first time.

“I asked for mentorship,” he says. “Books can’t teach you nature. Nature isn’t just science, it’s culture. It’s spiritual.”

This philosophy culminates in Anadol’s most ambitious undertaking yet: Dataland, a permanent institution set to open later this year in Los Angeles. Part museum, part research lab, part public dreamscape, Dataland will house AI models as cultural artifacts, present immersive installations, and host education programs at the intersection of ethics, systems, and creativity.

Biome Lumina. Credit: Courtesy of Refik Anadol Studio

“It’s not just a museum of pixels,” he says. “It’s a museum of the future. Of memory. Of imagination. It’s a space to think, not just to consume.”

In May, Anadol released “Biome Lumina,” a series of 1,000 “living paintings” on the blockchain and the first collection powered by his Large Nature Model, developed in collaboration with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. Trained on more than eight million images of flora, fauna, and fungi, the series channels its proceeds toward building Dataland.

Dataland carries a bold vision that demands a dedicated team. As Anadol’s profile has grown, so too have questions about how closely he remains involved in the work. He’s quick to dismiss the notion that he’s outsourced the creative process, pointing out that his team remains intentionally small at 20 members.

“I’m a hands-on programmer,” he says.” I connect my HDMI cable. I connect my keyboard. I connect my sensor. I change my parameters. I think that’s what people sometimes underestimate. That’s why we’re only 20 people, because I know there are artists working with hundreds, even thousands.”

Refik Anadol Studio. Credit: Courtesy of Refik Anadol Studio

Anadol is no stranger to criticism. In 2023, he famously clashed with Jerry Saltz after the art critic dismissed his work as “a banal screensaver,” to which Anadol fired back, “ChatGPT writes better than you.”

Anadol chuckles as he recalls the exchange, admitting that he’s a bit “edgy” when it comes to such critiques,as he feels he’s defending a wider movement of artists working with AI.

“I ask myself in the age of AI, is this really better than a large language model with multi-billion parameters?” he says. “Is this person putting something new in front of me that I don’t already know? So if someone reacts just for clickbait, I will reject it…. Otherwise, it will be treated like entertainment. This is not entertainment. This is education. This is research. This is art. This is poetry.”

“This is not entertainment. This is education. This is research. This is art. This is poetry.”
REFIK ANADOL

That sense of duty extends beyond the art world. For Anadol, education is just as essential to his practice as the work itself. He recently lectured to 3,000 high school teachers in California, many of whom said it was the first time AI felt approachable.

“That’s why Dataland matters,” he explains. “There’s no curriculum right now that really teaches how to raise a generation with AI. This is about cultural responsibility.”

Refik Anadol at TED. Credit: Courtesy of Refik Anadol Studios

Navigating a New Frontier

As AI tools proliferate and debates swirl about authorship, automation, and originality, Anadol highlights his work’s ethical transparency. Every exhibition includes documentation of training data, model choices, and source archives.

“People fear what they don’t understand,” he says. “So we show everything. The data, the process, the model. That’s how trust is built.”

Anadol views authorship in AI as a matter of agency. “If you don’t train your own model,” he says, “you don’t own your narrative.” For him, AI serves as both a tool and a reflection, shaped by what we feed it and defined by how we use it. “AI is a mirror,” he continues. “It reflects what we project into it… It’s also the first time in human history we have something that doesn’t forget. That’s profound.”

That perspective shapes his broader worldview. Though his work surged in visibility during the NFT boom of 2021, he remains wary of hype cycles. “Hype exhausts me,” he says. “We’re building for decades, not for dopamine.”

“Hype exhausts me. We’re building for decades, not dopamine.”
REFIK ANADOL

When 6529, the anonymous web3 thought leader, called him “the most ambitious person in the space,” Anadol smiled, but hesitated. “I don’t use language like that,” he says. “In a classroom, you don’t tell one student they’re the most ambitious. Everyone’s building something meaningful. But I think he saw something real in Dataland. It’s bigger than me. It’s a movement.”

It’s a movement that has undoubtedly elevated his profile. Anadol now counts Bill Gates and Huang among his collectors, and recently teamed up with football icon Lionel Messi on a charity artwork being auctioned through Christie’s.

For all the critical acclaim and institutional recognition, however, it was a child’s reaction that left the deepest impression. “A kid came up to me and said, ‘This looks like how I feel when I’m dreaming,’” Anadol recalls. “That was it. That’s what I want.”

Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive. Credit: Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy of Serpentine.

As we depart the Serpentine, the gallery hums behind us, its walls flickering with synthetic memories on replay. Anadol lingers, eyes on the evolving outputs, listening more than speaking. It’s as if the system is still dreaming, and he doesn’t want to wake it.

What’s next for the machine whisperer?

“More dreaming. More building. We’re opening the LA space soon,” he says. “We’re launching more research — emotional archives, nature models, collective memory studies. We’re inviting more people in. This isn’t just my story. It’s everyone’s.”

Editor’s note: Premium members are invited to a private Luminaries Salon Q&A with Refik Anadol on July 23rd at 1 pm ET. More details to come. Want access? Join us here.