An architect’s dream: Refik Anadol launches AI tribute to Frank Gehry at Guggenheim Bilbao

To witness the launch of the media artist Refik Anadol’s AI-powered generative artwork set up, Residing Structure: Gehry, on the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao—projected on the towering inside partitions of Frank Gehry’s architectural masterpiece as a part of the exhibition in situ: Refik Anadol—is to be reminded of the lengthy historical past of architect’s visionary goals.

It’s a historical past that ranges from the weightless Baroque of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s multi-level “capricci”; to the monumental spheres and pyramids of the 18th-century visionaries Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Etienne-Louis Boullée; and to the neo-Classicist CR Cockerell’s elegant The Professor’s Dream (1848), a receding imaginative and prescient, overlaying Historic Egypt to Excessive Renaissance, heaping temple upon tower upon ghostly dome. And naturally, there may be M.C. Escher’s intricately mind-bending visible puzzles and Frank Lloyd Wright’s unbuilt however uncompromising mile-high skyscraper.

Anadol has added new goals to that gallery, and reminded the viewer of the sheer sculptural verve of Gehry’s buildings. By taking archival knowledge provided by the 96-year-old Canadian-born Los Angeles-based architect, overlaying 65 years of labor—in addition to a mass of ethically accessed open-source architectural photographs—and mixing them with knowledge in Anadol’s personal massive nature mannequin, the artist has created a brand new massive structure mannequin, and from {that a} six-chapter synthetic intelligence (AI) expertise. The chapter construction expresses Anadol’s dedication to exhibiting his course of as an artist, one which he demonstrated a yr in the past in his exhibition Echoes of the Earth: Residing Archive at Serpentine Galleries, London, the place he used a knowledge course of wall to indicate radical readability on the uncooked knowledge sources and purposeful make-up of his massive nature mannequin.

In situ: Refik Anadol—curated by the Guggenheim Bilbao’s Lekha Hileman Waitoller as the primary of a sequence of site-specific “in situ” reveals deliberate by the museum—presents Residing Structure: Gehry within the 16-metre-tall Room 208. There’s a separate, smaller, “training room” the place the work’s course of is laid out for guests.

The chapters observe a procedural and narrative sequence, beginning with the compiling of architectural knowledge in a “reminiscence area”, earlier than the plotting of patterns in that knowledge. That is adopted by a stage of human-machine collaboration earlier than the emergence of the massive architectural mannequin, which transforms Gehry’s work in boundary-pushing instructions. The concluding chapters are an AI hallucination that produces abstracted visions, and a return to the world of structure the place the AI generates architectural goals in actual time.

How Anadol works with scale and area

Anadol’s packed sequence of AI installations across the globe over the previous two years has proven cautious consideration of the form and scale of the area at hand. From Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations within the ethereal Gund Foyer on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, New York (2022-2023), to the large exterior projection at Sphere in Las Vegas (September 2023), to the intimate brick, cloister-like, area of Serpentine North (February to April 2024), and the expansive major auditorium for the opening concert events of the World Financial Discussion board summit at Davos (2024 and 2025). That adaptation to area is centred on Anadol’s personal long-standing love of structure, which was given public expression in Residing Structure: Casa Batlló (2022), a media artwork piece projected onto Antonio Gaudí’s celebrated 1906 home in Barcelona. Anadol created the work through the use of AI to mannequin a dataset based mostly on hundreds of thousands of publicly obtainable photographs and paperwork regarding the home.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the character and scale of its bigger areas—which have an assertive presence that tends to problem even the grandest, most strong, of bodily artwork—really feel tailored to permit Anadol’s AI goals to develop and flourish. It’s a area, as Anadol tells The Artwork Newspaper, the place “the room turns into the canvas”, and the place the expertise goes “past the display screen”. The algorithm devised to generate the set up, matching the constructing’s serpentine contours, is “very completely different”, Anadol says. “It makes use of the constructing because the canvas. The entire thing is hooked up to the constructing, from ceiling to ground…following the body, following each curve.”

“Take a look at this, how nature and structure join,” Anadol says, as 50 projectors channel a surging visible narrative onto the partitions. The AI mannequin is iterating, or producing, repeatedly, with by no means the identical sequence of photographs. Whereas Anadol speaks, Efsun Erkeliç, co-founder and govt producer of Refik Anadol Studio and likewise Anadol’s spouse, walks in direction of the apex of Room 208, formed just like the ahead part of an empty supertanker’s hull.

As she approaches the area’s furthest level, she is dwarfed by the scale of the transferring photographs from Goals, the ultimate chapter of the set up. A dazzlingly white architectural-cum-mycelial creation—half cliff, half big fungal gills—eases majestically up the elevation, earlier than the visible narrative cuts to a looming honeycomb construction with saturated-green shrubbery pushing by its openings.

That sequence is changed in flip by fantastical, gridded, industrial-flavoured monochrome sketches—an AI meditation, maybe, on early-period Gehry, who began designing buildings within the Fifties when Frank Lloyd Wright was nonetheless at his drafting board and Philip Johnson on the pinnacle of his New York starchitect superstar—which tackle an more and more Escher-like high quality as they’re spooled and mirrored throughout the gallery partitions.

It’s a multi-sensory expertise, wherein the AI is prompted to motion by an immersive soundscape, composed by Kerim Karaoglu, and one with an olfactory factor: a particular, AI-conceived, scent for releasing into the area, in a improvement of a process demonstrated on the 2024 Serpentine present. Ryan Zurrer, one of many world’s main collectors and supporters of digital artwork, and founding father of the collective 1OF1 (a accomplice of the Bilbao exhibition), describes In situ: Refik Anadol in posts on Instagram and X, as “virtually definitely essentially the most advanced and technically subtle projection of all time, particularly given the uneven nature of the gallery & the evolving nature of the work”.

Anadol tells The Artwork Newspaper that within the yr he has spent getting ready the piece for Bilbao, he has been “dreaming a lot” on Gehry’s life and legacy. Considering on Gehry’s affect on the world, one which makes Residing Structure: Gehry a “very particular piece”. One which, Anadol says, is “wanted on this time of heated dialogue”. At Guggenheim Bilbao he’s intent on honouring the architect’s “constructive affect”, in addition to the achievements of different nice artists—Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt amongst them—who’re a part of the museum’s historical past as a cultural landmark that has reworked a metropolis’s picture and fortunes within the years since its opening in 1997.

Anadol and moral AI

Anadol is, as ever, on a mission for the preservation and enhancement of the worldwide surroundings. On the World Financial Discussion board in January, his Massive Nature Mannequin: Glacier was a warning in regards to the menace to the world’s glaciers, and particularly these of Antarctica. The Gehry set up is hosted, he says, on Google Cloud—one of many exhibition’s collaborators—within the Netherlands, the place the tech big has a sustainable knowledge centre powered by wind and solar. And the information used within the massive architectural mannequin are all both open supply, supplied by Gehry’s follow, captured by the Refik Anadol Studio, or accessed from the main pure historical past establishments who opened their collections for the creation of the sooner massive nature mannequin.

Together with his international profile, Anadol raises consciousness of digital artwork, of artists working with synthetic intelligence, and with the artist’s function in society. As Zurrer put it final week, Anadol has an “capacity to encourage hundreds of thousands and make all of it look so seamless”. It’s a capability, Zurrer wrote on social media following the present’s opening on 7 March, that “stands on the shoulders of his distinctive staff”, of whom Zurrer singled out Erkeliç and Dogukan Yesilcimen, the studio’s head of artwork relations.

Within the current sale of AI artwork at Christie’s New York, Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations – ISS Goals – A (2021) was the highest lot, promoting for $277,200 (with charges). It’s a part of the collection Machine Hallucinations, and makes use of satellite tv for pc imagery of Earth and 1.2m photographs taken by the Worldwide House Station. That on-line public sale earned headlines when an open letter signed by 1000’s of artists and inventive folks requested Christie’s to cancel the sale, saying it incentivised the “mass theft of human artists’ work” due to the behaviour of huge firms who constructed text-to-image AI fashions by scraping the web.

“I utterly agree with them,” Anadol tells The Artwork Newspaper, speaking of the open letter’s concern for the misuse of copyright materials, however, as when the letter was revealed in early February, he factors out that he has constructed his personal AI fashions and all the time with ethically sourced, or self-generated, knowledge. The ISS Goals piece, he says, was created utilizing an AI mannequin educated on publicly obtainable datasets from Nasa. It’s an irony not misplaced on Anadol that he, like so many artists concerned within the sale—together with the semi-autonomous AI artist Botto, and the duo Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon—have been those main a classy and helpful public debate on how artists’ work is owned and the way it’s used as coaching knowledge by huge AI firms.

Anadol presents a “pondering brush”—to dream with

For Anadol it has been a full first quarter of the yr, with the prospect of the opening of his studio’s Dataland museum of AI artwork in Los Angeles—probably earlier than the top of 2025, as town works to get well from the devastating affect of the current Palisades and Eaton wildfires—the place Anadol and Erkeliç arrange their studio in 2014. The museum will probably be based mostly in a flagship downtown location on the Gehry-designed improvement The Grand LA, throughout South Grand Avenue from Walt Disney Corridor performing arts centre, one other Gehry edifice, making it likewise a neighbour of the Museum of Up to date Artwork, Los Angeles (Moca) and the Broad museum. All these establishments, Anadol says, have given Dataland “a really heat welcome and heat help” to town’s museum quarter.

With Residing Structure: Gehry and the massive architectural mannequin it’s based mostly on, Anadol says, he’s providing the world a “pondering brush”. “We’re on this period,” he says, “the place we are able to prepare our personal AI fashions with our personal knowledge. It isn’t so completely different to creating our personal pigment and our personal gestures on a canvas.” Requested how working with AI for the previous decade has modified his angle to what artwork is, he says it has prompted him to ask “What’s actuality?”

Anadol says that it’s now potential to speak of a pondering brush and of a coming “generative actuality”, in reference to algorithm-powered generative artwork. It’s one thing, he says, that’s “turning into profoundly actual whereas we query what’s actuality”. And, referring to his idea of a pondering brush, he says that one of many causes he loves working with the massive nature mannequin and now the massive structure mannequin is that he can hand it to his colleagues and collaborators and say, “This is the comb. Do you need to dream?”

In situ: Refik Anadol , Guggenheim Museum Bilbao till 19 October.