“AI was always my target. It’s not something that popped up in my journey randomly,” says Refik Anadol, one of the foremost figures blending art and machine intelligence today. “Playing with games and computers at an early age, you know that one day, the machine can become your friend, your collaborator.”

It’s a philosophy that the Istanbul-born, LA-based media artist has maintained throughout his working life. “To me, AI is a tool that allows me to create a new collaborator that doesn’t forget, that remembers billions of points, and millions of whatever information I’m looking for, to be used as a pigment, as a form, as a sculpture, as a story.”

Anadol had been working with machine intelligence long before it spilled into the mainstream. He began to use computer programming to make art back in 2008, the year he says he coined the term ‘data painting’, and since then has worked at the intersection of visual media, data, and emergent technologies.