West Gates at Tom Bradley International Terminal

Refik Anadol is a Los Angeles-based artist working at the forefront of science and technology. His immersive environments, architectural interventions, and data paintings use archival footage and the rhythms of natural landscapes to investigate what it means to be a human in the age of artificial intelligence. LAX: Sky Dreams (2021) was inspired by the painter Vincent Van Gogh, who once said, “I dream of painting and then I paint my dreams.”

In response to this notion, Anadol asked, What would happen if an A.I. machine-mind stared up at the sky, like a painter, and then dreamt about what it had seen? To answer his inquiry, Anadol’s studio amassed a vast visual archive of over 13 million photographs of clouds and skies, and fed the data into a custom-designed A.I. program. The A.I. began to hallucinate its own interpretations of skyscapes, which Anadol then sculpted into an explorable data universe full of image-pixels swirling in an atmosphere of fluid color. The paintings seen here are a journey through the mind of that machine.

Anadol reminds us that machines do not forget, they only repurpose information from an infinite number of sources. The undulating shapes and digital pigments seen here are composed from millions of micro-moments in history. Our photographs and our experiences have been reframed by the A.I. as a mirror of our interconnectedness. Anadol’s data paintings thus represent the communal memory and consciousness of a collective body of sky observers, like Van Gogh. You might say that LAX: Sky Dreams is a group portrait of all of us, staring up at the sky together, sharing our thoughts, our dreams, and the beauty that we have seen.

Exhibition curated by Megan Steinman.