Refik Anadol is currently a MFA candidate at UCLA’s Design Media Arts Department. He is a media artist and designer working in the fields of live audio/visual performance, immersive installations and architectural photography, particularly his works explores the space among digital and physical by creating a relationship between architecture and media arts. 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.
His site-specific audio/visual performances in the public space have been seen in International Digital Arts Biennial Montreal (Canada), Ars Electronica Festival (Austria), l’Usine | Genève (Switzerland), Arc De Triomf (Spain), Zollverein | SANAA’s School of Design Building (Germany), santralistanbul Contemporary Art Center(Turkey), Outdoor Vision Festival SantaFe New Mexico (USA), Istanbul Design Biennial (Turkey), Sydney (Australia).
Tino Schwanemann 