ANNOUNCING: INFINITE SPACE A Retrospective by Refik Anadol

WASHINGTON, D.C.​ (May, 2019) – From June 13, 2019 through September 2, 2019 ARTECHOUSE will present the first major retrospective of the work of an award-winning Los-Angeles based Turkish born artist Refik Anadol at its Washington, DC art space. The exhibition features his infamous immersive installation titled “Infinity Room” seen by more than a million people around the world, including a half million during a tour in China alone last year, three infinity boxes and a selection of multimedia works spanning his variegated career.

ARTECHOUSE

Our lives are framed by a sense of finitude: the sense that everything that we perceive will cease to exist one day. But if finitude is the only absolute truth in life, how can we imagine structures and patterns that repeat themselves into an imperceivable horizon? How do we frame imagined realities that represent something beyond our perception of life and of linear time?

One of the greatest eighteenth-century English artists William Blake famously said, “if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is – infinite.” Refik Anadol’s ​Infinite Space​ is a collection of works that revisits Blake’s statement, and seeks to cleanse the doors of perception with the tools available to twenty-first-century artists. The exhibition explores memories and dreams through the mind of a machine by using data ​sets ​ranging from human memories, photographs of Mars, cultural archives and sea surface activity as data sculptures and paintings.

The exhibition features the following installations:

MAIN GALLERY:

• ARCHIVE DREAMING – an immersive media installation that employs machine learning algorithms to understand the relationships between archival materials from the SALT Research collections.
• MELTING MEMORIES – a data sculpture that explores the materiality of remembering by offering new insights into the representational possibilities emerging from the intersection of advanced technology and contemporary art.
• BOSPHORUS – a data sculpture that explores the rhythms of Marmara Sea in Turkey to visualize the poetic experience of organic movement.GALLERY 1:
• INFINITY ROOM – an immersive experience that hopes to capture the nature of infinity. Algorithmically generating light, sound and projection to portray the limitless, this piece seeks to deconstruct the framework of this illusory space and transgress the normal boundaries of the viewing experience. In 2017, Infinity Room was awarded Excellent Communications Design for Audiovisual Experience by The German Design Award.

“​A room that looks like you’ve just stepped into some kind of otherworldly portal or cosmic gateway, as the swirls, curls, and linear forms cause the walls to melt away,” ​VICE.

GALLERY 2:

• WIND DATA PAINTINGS – a series of digital paintings which seek to use data from wind patterns in cities such as Seoul, Dubai, and Boston to create a fluid representations of this invisible force.

MEDIA LAB:

• PLADIS:DATA UNIVERSE – an architectural immersive installation that explores a time and space journey inside an open source dataset from NASA.
• MACHINE MEMOIRS – an exploration of celestial structures through the mind of a machine. This immersive installation aims to combine past explorations and dream of what may exist just beyond our reach. Using machine intelligence to narrate the “unknown,” and a generative neural network trained on images of the Earth, Moon, Mars and the Galaxy, taken from ISS, Chandra, Kepler, Voyager, and Hubble observations, this installation imagines an alternate universe, perhaps providing further texture to the fabric of our own.
• MACHINE HALLUCINATIONS: MARS – an exploration of the relationship between memory and dreams, recognition and perception, offering a new kind of cartography for data universes using a neural network trained on images of Mars’ vast landscapes to imagine a space yet reachable by humankind.

ARTECHOUSE

Artist Statement:

“This collection of work represents my passion to critically pursue the intersection of machine intelligence, media, and architecture. I hope to offer a new visualization of our digitized memories, expanding the possibilities of architecture, narrative, and the body in motion, as well as a dramatic rethinking of the physical world, our relationship to time and space, and the creative potential of machines to enhance our cognitive capacities.” R​ efik Anadol about ​Infinite Space​.

Infinite Space w​ ill open for an exclusive Press Preview on June 12th, 2019, with subscribers early access on June 13th, 2019 and to the public starting June 14th, 2019.

TIMES & HOURS:​
Daytime Admission (Recommended Ages 6+): 10am – 5pm
After Hours Admission (21+): Sun – Thur 5pm – 10pm Fri & Sat 5:30pm – 11:30pm

• Evening and Weekend admission includes access to the operating bar with ARTECHOUSE’s Augmented Reality cocktails and mocktails.

TICKETS:

Single and group tickets ranging from $8-16 can be reserved in advance at artechouse.com starting May 27. Onsite tickets ranging from $10-20 can be purchased for available sessions.

LOCATION:

ARTECHOUSE / Washington, DC is located between Smithsonian and L’Enfant Plaza metro stations at 1238 Maryland Ave., SW, Washington, DC, just next door to the Mandarin Oriental hotel.

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ABOUT ARTECHOUSE

ARTECHOUSE is a leading innovative art space and platform in the U.S. solely dedicated to showcasing and producing the world’s best experiential and immersive digital art exhibitions by groundbreaking artists working at the intersection of art, science and technology. With locations in Washington, DC, Miami and New York City, ARTECHOUSE pioneers creative expression and new ways of looking at the world of digital art.

artechouse.com​ \\ @artechouse \\ ​#artechouse​

ABOUT REFIK ANADOL:

Refik Anadol (b.1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is a media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of machine intelligence. His body of work positions creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. In taking the data that flows around us as his primary material and the neural network of a computerized mind as his collaborator, Anadol paints with a thinking brush, offering us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expanding the possibilities of architecture, narrative, and the body in motion. Anadol’s site-specific parametric data sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, while offering a dramatic rethinking of the physical world, our relationship to time and space, and the creative potential of machines. Anadol is also a lecturer and researcher for UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts from which he obtained his Master of Fine Arts.

Refikanadol.com​ // ​instagram.com/refikanadol​ // ​​twitter.com/refikanadol