To create this year's TIME100 AI cover, artist Refik Anadol, who is included on this year's list, trained his studio's AI system on an archive containing each of TIME's more than 5,000 covers to date, spanning over 100 years. The resulting abstract visualization--featuring Anadol's signature flowing, molecular aesthetic--represents the AI "dreaming" about a century of TIME's visual history, he says. Dubbed the Large Nature Model by internationally renowned Turkish-American media artist Anadol and his team, his modular multimodal AI system is the product of extensive research and collaboration. According to Anadol's studio, the model was trained on "the most extensive, ethically collected dataset of the natural world," combining over half a billion images from the archives of organizations including the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution, and London's Natural History Museum with data collected directly from 16 rainforests. Anadol, whose work has been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, London's Serpentine Galleries, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao also worked with tech giants Nvidia and Google Cloud, which provided computing resources, while models such as Meta's Llama and Google's Gemini play a range of roles under the hood.

To Refik Anadol, data is a creative force. "For as long as I can remember, I have imagined data as more than just information--I have seen it as a living, breathing material, a pigment with infinite possibilities," the Turkish-American artist said on Monday during his acceptance speech at the TIME100 AI Impact Awards in Dubai. Anadol was one of four leaders shaping the future of AI to be recognized at TIME's fourth-annual Impact Awards ceremony in the city. California Institute of Technology professor Anima Anandkumar, musician Grimes, and Arvind Krishna, the CEO, chairman, and president of IBM, also accepted awards as a part of the night's festivities, which featured a performance by Emirati soul singer Arqam Al Abri. Anadol has spent over a decade showing the world that art can come from anywhere--even machines.

Two people dressed in black are kneeling on the floor, so still that they must surely be in pain. If they are grimacing, there would be no way to know – their features are obscured by oversized, smooth gold masks, as though they have buried their faces in half an Easter egg. Their stillness makes them seem like sculptures, and only by checking for the subtle rise and fall of their chests can you confirm they are indeed human. Which is fitting, really – because they aren't actually human, at least not totally. They're human-machine hybrids, "Idioms", created by French artist Pierre Huyghe for his largest ever exhibition, Liminal, at the Punta della Dogana in Venice.

On June 25, 1949, the British neurologist Geoffrey Jefferson gave a lecture to the Royal College of Surgeons of England entitled The Mind of Mechanical Man. It may be surprising that machine intelligence was the subject of much debate in Jefferson's time, with some describing the 1904s as the period in which artificial intelligence was born following the development of cybernetics. Jefferson's ideas about the intersection of human and machine were ahead of their time and even impressed the great Alan Turing with their prescience and clarity. "[N]ot until a machine can write a sonnet or a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain -- that is, not only write it but know that it had written it," Jefferson said in his lecture. "No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or miserable when it cannot get what it wants." Whether they know it or not, critics of artificial intelligence's application in the art world -- and by extension, the world of NFTs -- employ a version of Jefferson's argument when they decry that the technology takes something away from the creative "soul" of artists and their work.

Since graduating in 2014 with a master of fine arts from UCLA's design media arts program, artist Refik Anadol has become a worldwide sensation known for exhibitions that harness state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to create mind-blowing multisensory experiences. His body of work though, is much more than simply mesmerizing feasts for the eyes and ears; it addresses the challenges and possibilities that our ubiquitous computing has imposed on humanity. On April 19, Anadol's latest piece, "Moment of Reflection" will debut on campus, where he also serves as a lecturer in the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts. It was in that department, he learned from innovative professors like Christian Moeller, Casey Reas, Jennifer Steinkamp and Victoria Vesna, all of whom use digital technology to help reshape conceptions of art. "Using data is a scientific approach to something very soulful and spiritual," Anadol said.

Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music.--Attributed to Goethe But Missa solemnis 2.0, a collaboration between pioneering media artist and director Refik Anadol and The Philadelphia Orchestra (April 7, 9, 10, supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage), brings Goethe's pithy saying to stunning visual and sonic life in ways the German literary giant never could have imagined. Beethoven completed his Missa solemnis in 1823. Despite being regarded as one of his most stunning musical creations, the piece is rarely performed. The composer's partner in this century-spanning project, Refik Anadol, was born in Istanbul. In 2008, while still an undergrad there, he presented his first digital art installation.

For this performance of Beethoven with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Anadol "taught" his system by feeding it hundreds of thousands of images of Renaissance art and architecture, the kind of aesthetics that Beethoven himself would have been consuming when he wrote his celebrated works. "We are taking from the Renaissance era every single building ever done, every single sculpture ever created, and every single painting ever done," Anadol said. "These are amazingly large cultural data. We are trying to make an AI to dream these beautiful cultural elements of humanity." The system uses fluid dynamics algorithms to generate animation effects resembling flowing water and wind through hair.

NATURE DREAMS, designed specifically for KÖNIG GALERIE, comprises three novel aesthetic approaches to a vast photographic dataset of nature: A giant data sculpture displaying machine-generated, dynamic pigments of nature titled NATURE DREAMS, four new series of data paintings, and WINDS OF BERLIN, a site-specific, public art projection on the tower of ST. AGNES which will be created based on environmental real-time data collected from the city. Anadol is a pioneer in the world of rare digital art and crypto collectibles, minting the first fully immersive digital artwork NFT in September 2021. For KÖNIG GALERIE he creates unique NFT options: the AI data sculpture NATURE DREAMS, and his public projection, WINDS OF BERLIN, which will mark the first time a generative public artwork in Berlin to be offered in NFT form. An architectural exhibition of synesthetic reality experiments based on GAN algorithms developed by artificial intelligence and inspired by fluid dynamics, NATURE DREAMS turns datasets into latent multi-sensory experiences to commemorate the beauty of the earth we share.

Disclaimer: This is the translation of an article published at TAB UOL. At first, Google was the first company to release a massive solution using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate images, Deep Dream. Back in the day, this technology looked very exciting, probably for its potential rather than what it was actually doing at the moment -- a scary psychedelic creation filled with random dog faces. More recently, mobile apps like Zao began to automate deep fakes, through which people could replace the face of superheroes and Hollywoodian celebrities for their own. Now, the same company released Dream.ai, an AI based on text prompts.

In the near future, we should see the value of AI-generated NFTs to expand beyond generative art into more generic NFT utility categories providing a natural vehicle for leveraging the latest deep learning techniques. An example of this value proposition can be seen in digital artists like Refik Anadol who are already experimenting with cutting edge deep learning methods for the creation of NFTs. Anadol's studio have been a pioneer in using techniques such as GANs, and even dabbling into quantum computing, trained models in hundreds of millions images and audio clips to create astonishing visuals. NFTs have been one of the recent delivery mechanisms explored by Anadol. In the near future, we should see the value of AI-generated NFTs to expand beyond generative art into more generic NFT utility categories providing a natural vehicle for leveraging the latest deep learning techniques.