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In an Ontario plaza, interactive pavements play music ‘as if by magic’

2024-02-28T13:28:00-05:00

Montreal-based studio Daily tous les jours has completed a public space design in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. Titled 'River Lines,' the project saw the creation of an interactive stage in an urban plaza for big impromptu musical ensembles.

Video credit: doublespace photography

Part of the studio’s wider Musical Pavement series, the interactive wave-patterned pavement is embedded with 62 sensing light rings that “get people moving through musical collaboration exercises.” The infrastructure is formed of twelve in-house tailored audio tiles that have no visible hardware and blend with the wider pavement pattern, meaning “music emanates from the ground as if by magic.”

Image credit: doublespace photography

Located on the site of a 19th-century foundry, the artwork is “a response to the historical nature of the site” and “an exemplar of how investment in the public realm is essential to reimagine and activate places and encourage collective interacti...

Refik Anadol unveils ‘first-of-its-kind’ AI artwork NFTs

2021-09-17T11:37:00-04:00

Refik Anadol Studio has announced details of their Machine Hallucinations -Space: Metaverse NFT Collection, which is set to be auctioned by Sotheby’s Hong Kong. To create the NFTs, Anadol has minted a machine’s memories and dreams of space onto the blockchain, manifested through eight unique artworks. The works are set to become the first-ever examples of immersive digital experiences being converted into NFTs.

Image copyright: Refik Anadol Studio for Sotheby’s

The eight works consist of an immersive physical experience, three infinitely generative data paintings, three unique AI data paintings, and a one-of-a-kind robotically-produced AI data sculpture. Following their online auction from Sotheby’s Hong Kong from September 30th to October 4th, the works will be exhibited at the Digital Art Fair in Hong Kong from October 1st to 17th, 2021.

Image copyright: Refik Anadol Studio for Sotheby’s

“Since 2015, I have been speculating the relationship between the human mind, architecture, ...

Walt Disney Concert Hall lights up over the weekend with projections by Refik Anadol

2018-10-03T13:42:00-04:00

Celebrating its 100th anniversary, the LA Phil has put on quite the birthday extravaganza, kicking off over the weekend with performances by Chris Martin and members of the Doors; a special CicLAvia bike ride that stretched from Downtown's Disney Concert Hall to the Hollywood Bowl; and a series of vibrant projections from Refik Anadol.

Announced back in September, the local media artist used 45 terabytes of data derived from the Phil's archive to create a series of patterns then projected on the exterior of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Called 'WDCH Dreams', the media installation lit up the iconic Frank Gehry building beginning Thursday night, delighting passersby, and will continue to do so every evening through October 6th.

Refik Anadol to cover Walt Disney Concert Hall with vivid data projections

2018-09-13T15:42:00-04:00

One of the most recognizable buildings in Downtown Los Angeles—the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall—will be used as a canvas later this month. To celebrate the start of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new season, colorful patterns will be projected onto the metallic surface of the wavy concert hall for a little more than a week, courtesy of artist Refik Anadol.

For the LA Philharmonic projection series, called WDCH Dreams, internationally renowned media artist Refik Anadol dug deep in the digital orchestra archives—nearly 45 terabytes of data—and applied Google Arts and Culture's machine intelligence to it, which parsed the files into millions of data points that were then re-categorized and, with the help of deep neural networks, made new connections between LA Phil's "memories." According to Anadol, this process awakes the metaphorical "consciousness" of Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the result is a "radical visualization of the organization’s first century and an exploration of synergies between art and technology, and architecture and institutional memory."

WDCH Dreams, renderings by Refik Anadol Studio

To visualize the result of this process, Anadol will be using 42 large scale projectors, with 50K visual resolution, 8-channel sound, and 1.2M luminance in total, which should create quite a spectacular display on the stainless-steel fac...

Refik Anadol's new "data sculpture" unveiled at the SOM-designed 350 Mission in San Francisco

2015-12-07T20:12:00-05:00

The first permanent publicly-viewable artwork by Refik Anadol, a media artist known for his immersive, site-specific light installations, was recently unveiled in San Francisco. Virtual Depictions: San Francisco, a series of "data sculptures" based on a publicly-available dataset, occupies a 40 ft. screen in the lobby of 350 Mission and involved collaborations with the building's architects, Skidmore, Owings and Merill, and developer, Kilroy Realty.

"The ambient qualities of urban ecologies, as we as civilizations create them in specific geographic locations, are coming to the forefront of cultural production," Anadol told Archinect. "With the advent of digital media and environmental consciousness we now are able, more so than any at other point in human history, to access the formal qualities of the ambient environment in terms of the built, social and natural environments."

"Through sensors, databases, and visualization we can collect information on the real-time dynamics of citie...

Building a collaborative jig-saw pavilion at the Media and Architecture Biennale in Aarhus

2014-12-09T20:51:00-05:00

"Programming Natural Affect" was one of the collaborative workshops during the Media and Architecture Bienniale 2014 last month in Aarhus, Denmark. Organized by Anna Ulak and Philipp Rahlenbeck of openconstructs, the workshop focused on fusing the organic properties of nature and the built urban environment through new media and architecture.

Participants learned about combining analog and digital production methods as they worked with each other and the organizers in building a small prefabricated pavilion. At the end of the workshop, the pavilion was displayed in the Main Exhibition during the Bienniale.

Ulak shared further project details below:

"Rather than trying to fully control/manage the relationship between the natural and built environment with computation (and its metaphors), this proposal sets out to augment the natural world. Thus creating artificial environments that evokes the organic. An architecture that artificially amplifies the experiences of nature that is diminish...

Bright nights at TED2014 Vancouver with Chrome-powered aerial sculpture

2014-03-19T17:47:00-04:00

Donning a spectrum of colors and moving beams of light, the "Unnumbered Sparks" installation comes to life every night as it hovers near the site of the 30th anniversary TED2014 world conference in downtown Vancouver, Canada.

Artist Janet Echelman and director of the Google Data Art Group Aaron Koblin -- who both spoke at TED2011 -- collaborated in designing the aerial sculpture just in time for TED2014. Echelman officially introduced the work earlier this week at the conference.

The 745-foot net, which is powered by Google Chrome and other modern web technologies, can be choreographed by visitors using their smartphones or tablets to "paint" the sculpture in real time.

Visitors in the area will be able to interact with Unnumbered Sparks every night until Saturday, March 22.

Check out the video below to see the creative process behind the piece.

Apologue's Tali Krakowsky to Speak at FITC Toronto 2011

2011-04-29T14:12:05-04:00

Tali Krakowsky, founder of experience design studio Apologue, will be speaking at the 10th annual conference of FITC in Toronto.

Her session, presented with Branden Hall of Automata Studios, will explore the behind-the-scenes of Apologue’s new permanent media installation for the cultural institution, LA Plaza, in Downtown LA.

New forms of display technology, together with innovations in cloud computing and the possibilities of generative code, have inspired a different approach to digital storytelling for media installations. Krakowsky and Hall will discuss the inner workings of this unique, self-choreographing, generative show control system that embodies ideas around the present and possible future of narrative, and its possibilities in physical environments.

FITC is a design and technology festival that operates globally. This year, for its anniversary, it will feature speakers Kyle Cooper, GMUNK, Wesley Grubbs, Robert Hodgins, Seb Lee-Delisle, MK12 and Theo ...