Istanbul-born media artist and design innovator Refik Anadol has quickly become a household name with his mind-bending, data-driven art. This year, Anadol continues to push what's possible during his visual backdrop debut at the 65th annual Grammy Awards. 

"The collaboration with the Recording Academy started almost six months ago with an exciting call from the designers who are in charge of the stage design and the whole flow of the ceremony," Anadol shared with Archinect. 

Anadol's work can be seen in the background illuminating the space during the award's premier ceremony speech by the Recording Academy's CEO Harvey Mason Jr. Video courtesy of Recording Academy/Grammys.

Along with the event's lead production designer Julio Himede, the art direction team, and electronic graphics expert Hugh Grew, Anadol's distinct data-generated paintings from his AI artwork and NFT collections, Machine Hallucinations — Nature Dreams and Machine Hallucinations: Space Metaverse, could be spotted onstage. 

"They researched our Machine Hallucination series, which is the result of seven years of AI research, which started in 2016 when we began transforming AI outputs into data pigmentation, which is a type of aesthetic output of machine dreams based on certain topics, or datasets, such as nature, space, cities, weather data, or even culture. In the end, they chose two artworks," Anadol explained. 

"One was based on large photographic datasets of images from the Hubble, which produced machine dreams of all the galaxies that were recorded by this amazing telescope. This, to me, is very poetic because it’s technically photos of our past, and the memories of the universe. The second was from the nature series, which utilizes, in total, 300 million photographs of nature — landscapes, flowers, fungi, forests, lakes, oceans, etc. They chose artworks based on two subsets of this dataset — flowers and landscapes."

In September 2021, Archinect's Niall Patrick Walsh had the opportunity to chat with Anadol about his process, his then-upcoming NFT project, and how he became one of the first designers to "properly explore and articulate" the idea of projecting visual data onto physical architecture. During the interview, Anadol helped illustrate why his work should be observed for its visually stunning outcomes and for its poetically complex process that pulls from architectural thinking.

"Because this year, they were going for an immersive stage design, they chose to license our artworks and turn them into a media experience on the giant screens on the stage," added Anadol. "One very exciting aspect is that they wanted me to be included in many important details — the color selection, the speed, form and textures, so it was a beautiful collaboration."

To those outside the world of architecture, media art, and AI-driven industries, Anadol's work could be understood as a colorful and visually enticing "backdrop" that helped compliment the Grammy's art direction and 2023 production theme. 

While art news media outlets such as Hyperallergic and Artnet have reported on Anadol's "breakthrough appearance" at the Grammys, what I'm more intrigued about is how his work within architecture, data, and machine learning continues to create new opportunities for designers and architects with similar skills looking to explore non-traditional career paths. 

Since Anadol founded his eponymous studio in 2014, he has frequently expressed the collaborative powers of his team and its multidisciplinary background of individuals consisting of architects, data scientists, artists, researchers, machine learning scientists, fabricators, and more.