Name: AI art divide: Revolutionary or a gimmick?
Uploaded: 2026-02-23T23:02:00.000Z
Duration: 13 min 20 s
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Modal verbs - B1

When you think about the way art is created, you might imagine painters, photographers or sculptors immersed in their work at their studios.

But what about a person sitting in front of a computer screen using artificial intelligence and data to create visuals?

It's a question that is being asked and answered by some of the most prestigious museums, critics and auction houses in the world.

Some artists call AI a revolutionary new medium.

We wanted to see it for ourselves, so we went to Los Angeles to meet Rafiq Anadol.

The 40 year old Turkish American artist is considered a pioneer in the world of AI art.

If you're wondering what that world looks like, grab your Dramamine.

Rafiq Anadol invited us inside this space at his LA studio.

Every image that surrounds us, Anadol created using artificial intelligence.

We'll get to exactly how he created it in a moment, but first, take it in.

A hypnotic flow of shapes and colors that morph and evolve in the mirrors and LED screens that surround us.

It can make you feel like Alice in Wonderland stumbled into Studio 54.

I will say that you should not have a cocktail before standing here.

All of this while a device around your neck pumps out different AI generated scents such as rain and flowers to accompany what you're seeing.

Anadol says eventually another device will monitor viewers vital statistics such as heartbeat.

And that data will be used to change the art in real time.

Like we are discovering a new place that's never been before.

If that all sounds a bit out there, consider the planetary scale of Rafiq Anadol's work.

His massive mind bending images have been stretched across the sphere in Las Vegas, the facade of the Walt Disney Concert hall in Los Angeles, and

When people ask you what you do, what do you say?

So I'm a media artist and I'm using data and AI in my work.

So more than 16 years, I paint with a thinking brush.

I believe that in information around us, the data around us have its own voice.

But like painting, drawing, the things we traditionally think of, sculpting.

So technically I may not draw well, but in my mind's eye I can compute.

I can imagine geometrically what exactly the mind's eye is looking for to create art.

For this piece, he used 200 million photos of Earth.

Data from NASA was the driving force behind these exhibits.

When I think about data as a pigment, I think it doesn't need to dry.

It can move in any shape, in any form, any color and texture.

It is trippy because I think as artists we ask what is beyond reality?

To show us how he does that, Anadol grabbed a gaming controller.

So we are in this new algorithm that I am literally controlling the whole system.

Anadol says his team curated 153 million images for a piece on California landscapes.

We are flying in our data set of nature, okay, so in this archive we have flora, fauna.

Each image is converted into a series of data points that represents its characteristics, such as color, texture and shape.

They're then plotted into multi dimensional space.

So when it receives a prompt, it can create its own new version.

Images, Anadol says only quote, exist in the mind of a machine.

This is AI dreaming this world and now we are reshaping this world together.

Anadal then applies special algorithms to blend and make the images into his signature fluid style.

Are you a computer programmer or are you an artist?

But now with AI, I feel like I have now programmed it in a way that I never imagined before.

How much of this is driven by you and how much by the machine?

So this is a great question because I tried my very best last 10 years to make a 50% machine, 50% human.

Treating AI as a co creator has made Rafiq Anadal a darling of the tech world.

He's teamed up with Google, MIT and Microsoft to create large public installations.

He's been embraced by some in the art world.

Sold at 1 million1 selling his pieces for upwards of a million dollars at auction.

His work has been exhibited at museums around the world.

And in 2022 the Museum of Modern Art, New York commissioned this P a colossal 24 foot high installation that filled the MoMA lobby, called Unsupervised.

How did the public react to Unsupervised?

When they came in and saw it, it was a utter extraordinary hit.

People sat in front of it for hours, literally transfixed by what they were seeing.

Glenn Lowry was the director of the MoMA for three decades.

He retired in September to Create unsupervised.

Lowry told us Rafiq Anadol trained an AI system on the publicly available metadata of the entire MoMA collection.

Think of metadata as the digital DNA of each piece.

Anadol used MoMA's metadata to to reimagine 200 years of art, wrote some algorithms that allowed the data from one object to evolve into the data of another object, to become yet a third object or a fourth object never before seen.

And I think people found it deeply satisfying.

It's one of the most popular images in the collection.

Studies have found that typically museum visitors spend about 28 seconds looking at great works of art.

For unsupervised, Anadol Sundays, it was 38 minutes.

It's like a giant lava lamp that you can't take your eyes off of.

Jerry Saltz is the Pulitzer Prize winning art critic for New York Magazine.

It's like an Etch A Sketch he called Unsupervised, a half million dollar screensaver splashing into.

When people came in and they looked at this, they looked at it for 38 minutes.

How long you spend with a work of art is not a sign of success so much as your willingness to get quiet within yourself, go to uncomfortable places, become comfortable in those places.

Asking yourself questions in front of a Rafiq Adenol.

You sit down, go into a stupor, and you don't have to think much.

You go, oh, there goes a painting that looks a little like Renoir morphing into one that looks like Picasso morphing into an amoeba.