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Anadol Refik

“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 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. He holds a
master of fine arts degree from University of California, Los Angeles in Media Arts, 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. Co-founder and Creative director at Antilop.

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. 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 re-defining 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 smart phones 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