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Hi, I'm Refik. I'm a media artist.
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I use data as a pigment
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and paint with a thinking brush
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that is assisted by artificial intelligence.
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Using architectural spaces as canvases,
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I collaborate with machines
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to make buildings dream and hallucinate.
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You may be wondering, what does all this mean?
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So let me please take you into my work and my world.
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I witnessed the power of imagination when I was eight years old,
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as a child growing up in Istanbul.
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One day, my mom brought home a videocassette
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of the science-fiction movie "Blade Runner."
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I clearly remember being mesmerized
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by the stunning architectural vision of the future of Los Angeles,
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a place that I had never seen before.
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That vision became a kind of a staple of my daydreams.
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When I arrived in LA in 2012
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for a graduate program in Design Media Arts,
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I rented a car and drove downtown
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to see that wonderful world of the near future.
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I remember a specific line
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that kept playing over and over in my head:
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the scene when the android Rachael
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realizes that her memories are actually not hers,
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and when Deckard tells her they are someone else's memories.
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Since that moment,
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one of my inspirations has been this question.
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What can a machine do with someone else's memories?
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Or, to say that in another way,
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what does it mean to be an AI in the 21st century?
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Any android or AI machine
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is only intelligent as long as we collaborate with it.
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It can construct things
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that human intelligence intends to produce
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but does not have the capacity to do so.
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Think about your activities and social networks, for example.
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They get smarter the more you interact with them.
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If machines can learn or process memories,
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can they also dream?
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Hallucinate?
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Involuntarily remember,
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or make connections between multiple people's dreams?
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Does being an AI in the 21st century simply mean not forgetting anything?
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And, if so,
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isn't it the most revolutionary thing that we have experienced
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in our centuries-long effort to capture history across media?
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In other words,
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how far have we come since Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner"?
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So I established my studio in 2014
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and invited architects,
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computer and data scientists, neuroscientists,
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musicians and even storytellers
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to join me in realizing my dreams.
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Can data become a pigment?
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This was the very first question we asked
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when starting our journey to embed media arts into architecture,
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to collide virtual and physical worlds.
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So we began to imagine what I would call the poetics of data.
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One of our first projects, "Virtual Depictions,"
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was a public data sculpture piece
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commissioned by the city of San Francisco.
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The work invites the audience
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to be part of a spectacular aesthetic experience
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in a living urban space
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by depicting a [unclear] network of connections of the city itself.
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It also stands as a reminder
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of how invisible data from our everyday lives,
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like the Twitter feeds that are represented here,
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can be made visible
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and transformed into sensory knowledge that can be experienced collectively.
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In fact, data can only become knowledge when it's experienced,
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and what is knowledge and experience can take many forms.
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When exploring such connections
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through the vast potential of machine intelligence,
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we also pondered the connection between human senses
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and the machines' capacity for simulating nature.
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These inquiries began while working on wind-data paintings.
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They took the shape of visualized plans
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based on hidden data sets that we collected from wind sensors.
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We then used generative algorithms
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to transform wind speed, gust and direction
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into an ethereal data pigment.
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The result was a meditative yet speculative experience.
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This kinetic data sculpture, titled "Bosphorus,"
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was a similar attempt to question our capacity to reimagine
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natural occurrences.
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Using high-frequency radar collections of the Marmara Sea,
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we collected sea-surface data
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and projected its dynamic movement with machine intelligence.
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We create a sense of immersion
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in a calm yet constantly changing synthetic sea view.
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Seeing with the brain is often called imagination,
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and, for me, imagining architecture
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goes beyond just glass, metal or concrete,
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instead experimenting with the furthermost possibilities of immersion
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and ways of augmenting our perception in built environments.
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Research in artificial intelligence is growing every day,
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leaving us with the feeling of being plugged into a system
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that is bigger and more knowledgeable
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than ourselves.
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In 2017, we discovered an open-source library
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of cultural documents in Istanbul
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and began working on "Archive Dreaming,"
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one of the first AI-driven public installations in the world,
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an AI exploring approximately 1.7 million documents that span 270 years.
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One of our inspirations during this process
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was a short story called "The Library of Babel"
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by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
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In the story, the author conceives a universe in the form of a vast library
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containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set.
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Through this inspiring image,
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we imagine a way to physically explore the vast archives of knowledge
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in the age of machine intelligence.
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The resulting work, as you can see,
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was a user-driven immersive space.
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"Archive Dreaming" profoundly transformed the experience of a library
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in the age of machine intelligence.
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"Machine Hallucination" is an exploration of time and space
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experienced through New York City's public photographic archives.
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For this one-of-a-kind immersive project,
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we deployed machine-learning algorithms
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to find and process over 100 million photographs of the city.
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We designed an innovative narrative system
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to use artificial intelligence to predict or to hallucinate new images,
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allowing the viewer to step into a dreamlike fusion
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of past and future New York.
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As our projects delve deeper
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into remembering and transmitting knowledge,
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we thought more about how memories were not static recollections
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but ever-changing interpretations of past events.
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We pondered how machines
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could simulate unconscious and subconscious events,
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such as dreaming, remembering and hallucinating.
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Thus, we created "Melting Memories"
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to visualize the moment of remembering.
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The inspiration came from a tragic event,
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when I found out that my uncle was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
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At that time, all I could think about
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was to find a way to celebrate how and what we remember
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when we are still able to do so.
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I began to think of memories not as disappearing
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but as melting or changing shape.
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With the help of machine intelligence,
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we worked with the scientists at the Neuroscape Laboratory
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at the University of California,
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who showed us how to understand brain signals as memories are made.
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Although my own uncle was losing the ability to process memories,
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the artwork generated by EEG data
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explored the materiality of remembering
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and stood as a tribute to what my uncle had lost.
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Almost nothing about contemporary LA
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matched my childhood expectation of the city,
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with the exception of one amazing building:
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the Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry,
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one of my all-time heroes.
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In 2018, I had a call from the LA Philharmonic
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who was looking for an installation
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to help mark the celebrated symphony's hundred-year anniversary.
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For this, we decided to ask the question,
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"Can a building learn? Can it dream?"
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To answer this question,
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we decided to collect everything recorded in the archives of the LA Phil and WDCH.
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To be precise, 77 terabytes of digitally archived memories.
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By using machine intelligence,
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the entire archive, going back 100 years,
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became projections on the building's skin,
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42 projectors to achieve this futuristic public experience
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in the heart of Los Angeles,
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getting one step closer to the LA of "Blade Runner."
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If ever a building could dream,
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it was in this moment.
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Now, I am inviting you to one last journey into the mind of a machine.
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Right now, we are fully immersed in the data universe
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of every single curated TED Talk from the past 30 years.
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That means this data set includes 7,705 talks from the TED stage.
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Those talks have been translated into 7.4 million seconds,
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and each second is represented here in this data universe.
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Every image that you are seeing in here
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represents unique moments from those talks.
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By using machine intelligence,
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we processed a total of 487,000 sentences
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into 330 unique clusters of topics like nature, global emissions,
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extinction, race issues, computation,
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trust, emotions, water and refugees.
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These clusters are then connected to each other
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by an algorithm,
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and 113 million line segments [are generated],
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which reveal new conceptual relationships.
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Wouldn't it be amazing to be able to remember
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all the questions that have ever been asked on the stage?
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Here I am,
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inside the mind of countless great thinkers,
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as well as a machine, interacting with various feelings
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attributed to learning,
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remembering, questioning
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and imagining all at the same time,
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expanding the power of the mind.
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For me, being right here
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is indeed what it means to be an AI in the 21st century.
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It is in our hands, humans,
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to train this mind to learn and remember
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what we can only dream of.
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Thank you.