Imagining Machines: Refik Anadol’s Generative Art
We are living through a moment in which artificial intelligence is reshaping everyday life at a speed that outpaces our ability to understand it. Refik Anadol’s AI-generated works are spectacular, ambitious and widely debated. In this essay, published in the catalogue for ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition trilogy Nature Future, I use his immersive, large-scale works as a lens through which to examine how his practice carries forward a Silicon Valley vision of technology and what gets lost when utopia becomes the only available narrative.
Anadol’s immersive, large-scale works translate vast datasets into sensory experiences, inviting audiences into what he calls the machine’s dreams. But behind the beauty of his visual language lie pressing questions: about the tech industry’s influence on society, on contemporary art, about who owns data and at what cost, and about whether utopian confidence in technology can coexist with genuine responsibility for it.
Drawing on thinkers including Bruno Latour, Kate Crawford, and Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, the essay argues that art has a crucial role to play in shaping how we imagine and take responsibility for our technological futures.
Published in Nature Future, ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Strandberg Publishing, 2026. Editor Pernille Gøtze Johansson, graphics by Filip Grønning.
Download the full publication here.
Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams.(Immersive Edition), 2023