Artist Refik Anadol On Turning Oxford Archives Into A Living AI Dreamscape

InnovationScienceArtist Refik Anadol On Turning Oxford Archives Into A Living AI DreamscapeByLeslie Katz,Senior Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Leslie Katz covers the intersection of culture, science and tech.Follow AuthorApr 24, 2026, 12:26pm EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.Refik Anadol trained "Archive Dreaming" on vast botanical datasets from Oxford University's Bodleian Libraries.Refik Anadol StudiosOn a curved LED screen about 12 feet high and 40 feet wide, shape-shifting digital forms in blazing oranges, reds and yellows blossom and dissolve into one another like flowers from an otherworldly garden. This isn’t a hallucination. It’s “Archive Dreaming,” an immersive installation by Refik Anadol, a Turkish-American media artist known for synthesizing machine intelligence and data visualization to create public art, often at monumental scale. His work has been displayed around the world, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Venice Biennale, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, among other venues. For the past several years, Anadol’s creations have emerged from his studio’s “Large Nature Model,” an original AI system trained entirely on nature data such as high-resolution images, field recordings and biosensor signals. Via prompting and autonomous processes, the model transforms data into dynamic AI data paintings the artist hopes will inspire a fresh view of the natural world. “Nature is the most inspiring thing we have as humanity from many, many perspectives,” Anadol said in an interview. “In the Encyclopedia of Life, there are more than 2.2 million entries of species we discovered, but it’s very hard to see the big picture.” New Home For The Humanities At Oxford“Archive Dreaming” will greet visitors at the Saturday public opening of Oxford Uni...