Refik Anadol

In Data Fall: AKBANK, internationally acclaimed media artist Refik Anadol and his team offer an immersive meditation on memory, nature, and the flow of information. This site-specific AI Data Sculpture transforms an institutional space into a living archive of interconnected intelligences, where art, science, and technology converge to narrate new relationships between humanity, machine, and the environment.

Drawing on an expansive dataset that includes weather patterns, ecological memory, institutional archives, and collective photographic imagery, Data Fall explores how data can be reimagined as pigment and form. Anadol and his team train a custom machine learning model to process and visualize these inputs, generating a continuously evolving composition of vivid shapes, rhythms, and colors. The result is an artwork that performs a poetic synthesis of nature and history through the lens of artificial intelligence—suggesting both the fragility and resilience of the systems that surround us.

Structured in four chapters, the artwork offers a deeply sensory experience of data as landscape, memory, and mirror. It invites viewers to reflect on the architectures we build—digital, social, and ecological—and the evolving role of machine intelligence in shaping how we see, remember, and imagine our world.

Data Archives

The artwork begins with a flow of institutional memory: lines, textures, and networks emerge from historical data, tracing the evolving rhythms of economic activity and decision-making over time. As these elements shift and recombine, the chapter offers a kinetic portrait of organizational life as both a system of transactions and a repository of human agency.

Data Memories

The second chapter draws on photographs and documentation to build a visual memoryscape of place and people. Moments of celebration, transformation, and everyday life coalesce into abstract visuals—honoring the architecture and the lived experience of those who shape Akbank as well as those who are shaped by it. Memory, here, becomes both subject and material.

Winds of Istanbul

This chapter engages with Istanbul’s real-time meteorological data, collected from sensors placed across the city. Wind direction, gust intensity, and atmospheric conditions are translated into fluid visual motion. The result is a portrait of Istanbul in constant flux—a city animated by invisible forces and vibrant interactions between nature and the built environment.

Coral Dreams

Concluding with a gesture toward planetary consciousness, the final chapter immerses viewers in an oceanic hallucination generated from over 100 million images of coral ecosystems. Drawing attention to the impact of climate change on marine life, the work simulates an AI-driven coral reef—an artificial ocean memory that embodies both beauty and ecological urgency.