Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: The trend is all about artificial intelligence and the monumental installations it produces. Refik Anadol (born in 1985), this magician of pixels who transforms data into digital spectacles, has become the darling of an art world starved for thrills. From his Los Angeles studio, this Turkish-American artist creates works that resemble psychedelic fluids in perpetual motion, as if Timothy Leary had programmed a screensaver on acid.
With his oversized installations like Machine Hallucinations at the MoMA or Living Architecture at Barcelona’s Casa Batlló, Anadol plays the role of the high priest of a new technological religion. His works are digital cathedrals where code replaces incense and algorithms act as prayers. Walter Benjamin warned us in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that the aura of the artwork would vanish with mechanical reproduction. But Anadol has found the solution: creating an artificial aura so dazzling that it blinds viewers to the emptiness behind it.
The first striking aspect of his work is his obsession with machine learning and big data. Anadol presents himself as a modern demiurge transforming millions of images into hallucinatory visions. But as Jean Baudrillard might have pointed out, this is pure hyperreality, a simulacrum that no longer simulates anything. When he uses 300 million photos of New York to create Machine Hallucination, he’s merely recycling images in a giant digital blender that produces a tasteless, odorless visual soup. It’s fast-food art for Instagram, served on recycled plastic plates.
The second, even more problematic aspect is his relationship with cultural institutions and major tech corporations. Microsoft, NVIDIA, Google: Anadol collects corporate collaborations like others collect stamps. His installation Unsupervised at the MoMA is nothing more than a tech demo disguised as art. Friedrich Nietzsche warned us against the “last men”, those who invent happiness and blink. Visitors to the MoMA blink at Anadol’s screens, dazzled by a spectacle that’s merely a hollow celebration of technological power.
His works are like those glass-and-steel buildings that reflect everything but reveal nothing. Roland Barthes would likely see in these installations the zero degree of digital art—art that speaks the language of technology but has nothing to say. When Anadol claims his machines “dream” or “hallucinate”, he anthropomorphizes algorithms with the naivety of a child believing their Tamagotchi is alive.
The truth is, Anadol is the perfect representative of what Guy Debord called the society of the spectacle, where “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”. His installations are machines for mass-produced wonder, factories for likes that turn art into Instagram-compatible experiences.
Meanwhile, at London’s Serpentine Gallery, his installation Echoes of the Earth pretends to reconnect us with nature through visualizations of biodiversity data. What irony! Using energy-guzzling servers to talk about ecology is like hosting a vegetarian conference at a steakhouse. Martin Heidegger warned us that technology is not neutral—that it turns everything into a “standing reserve”. Forests and oceans become mere data sources to exploit for spectacle in Anadol’s works.
Anadol’s defenders will say his art is “democratic”, that it attracts crowds. But as Theodor Adorno noted, popularity is not a criterion of artistic quality. The 65,000 people who gathered outside Casa Batlló to see his work would probably have lined up for any sufficiently large and flashy light show.
What’s fascinating is how Anadol quantifies even criticism of his work. He boasts that 22 out of 24 reviews of his MoMA installation were favorable. This statistical approach to art criticism is symptomatic: even the reception of his work must be turned into data. This is what Jacques Rancière would call the “aesthetic police”, an attempt to control and quantify what should, by nature, escape measurement.
His installation DVOŘÁK DREAMS in Prague might be the pinnacle of this drift. Taking 54 hours of the composer’s music, transforming it into data, and claiming to create a posthumous “man-machine collaboration” is an example of technological arrogance bordering on the grotesque. Antonín Dvořák, who drew inspiration from folk songs and nature, is turned into a data stream for a 100-square-meter LED spectacle.
The true pioneers of digital art, like Nam June Paik, who paved the way for critical reflections on technology, must be rolling in their graves. Anadol is not their heir—he’s the Steve Jobs of contemporary art, creating spectacular but fundamentally empty products, user experiences rather than artworks.
The issue is not that Anadol uses artificial intelligence—after all, art has always integrated new technologies. The issue is that he does so without critical distance, without poetry, with a blind faith in technological progress reminiscent of the worst aspects of Italian Futurism. He is the perfect embodiment of what Bernard Stiegler called “symbolic misery”, this loss of singularity and meaning in a world where everything is calculable and reproducible.
His installations are like those air-conditioned malls where you lose all sense of time and space. You enter, marvel at the pretty moving colors, snap a few photos for social media, and leave unchanged, unchallenged in your certainties. It’s art that doesn’t hurt, doesn’t question, content to be pretty and impressive.
Anadol is not so much an artist as a symptom—a symptom of an era that confuses technological innovation with artistic progress, the quantity of data with depth of thought, spectacle with aesthetic experience. His works are monuments to a society that has lost its sense of transcendence and looks to algorithms for a new form of spirituality.
If Marshall McLuhan was right in saying that the medium is the message, then Anadol’s message is clear: art in the age of artificial intelligence risks becoming as empty and predictable as a YouTube recommendation algorithm. His installations are the perfect totems of an era that prefers video mapping to painting, data processing to critical thinking, and spectacle to contemplation.
Refik Anadol, GAME OVER.