Artist Refik Anadol Turns Data Into Art, With Help From AI

Giant stashes of data are valuable assets to corporations in industries from fossil fuels to finance. Artist Refik Anadol sees pools of data as something else--material for what he calls a new kind of "sculpture." Anadol creates mesmerizing art installations by seeking out interesting data sets and processing them into swirling visualizations of how computers capture the world and people in it. He does it by using techniques from artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning algorithms, to filter or expand on his raw material. The results, shown on giant screens or projected onto walls or entire buildings, use data points in a kind of AI pointillism.