For the second year running, the Los Angeles-based media artist Refik Anadol will present a room-sized, artificial-intelligence-powered installation related to global warming and the environmental crisis at the opening concert of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos.
In 2024 the subject was the rainforests and their flora and fauna; and in 2025 the focus will be on the fate of the world’s glaciers in a time of climate change—and specifically those in Antarctica—to align with the UN General Assembly’s declaration of 2025 as the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. In both cases, the Refik Anadol Studio has generated immersive experiences by working with ethically sourced massive data sets presented in artificial intelligence (AI) models powered by renewable energy, producing work that is designed to provoke action.
The art for this year’s opening concert, Anadol tells The Art Newspaper, will reflect “the beauty of the glaciers and the life in them, their fauna systems and more”. As the Morphing Chamber Orchestra and the vocal soloists perform, Anadol’s visuals—using his Large Nature Model to run a massive data base of glacier images, more than 10 million of which were collected by Anadol and his studio—will play on the walls of the plenary hall of the Davos congress centre.
Anadol and his team assembled those images on visits to Iceland, Antarctica and beyond. “We surveyed, we travelled and we transformed these beautiful ice caves, beautiful natural formations, and captured them in different lightings, different seasons and different conditions.” Glaciers are humanity’s fresh water source, he says, “and having them melting rapidly, changing their formation and functions, is a crucial problem”.
From their first collaboration, Joseph Fowler, the head of arts and culture for the WEF, told Anadol that he was intrigued by the mix of AI, ethics and nature in his work, and how it “can bring contribution, dialogue, transforming action, not just talking”. That, Anadol says, “was a great brief to me because I don’t just talk. We do aesthetically experiential work, but behind the scenes we always try to move people, move humanity, move the thing that we believe in.”
After first experiencing Anadol’s work in 2021, Fowler reached out to Anadol in 2022, and commissioned from him the first of two large-scale site-specific artworks. Artificial Realities: Coral premiered at Davos in 2023 and Living Archive: Nature was unveiled at the 2024 annual meeting. Last year, Anadol also premiered his Large Nature Model and created an immersive artwork—an extension of Living Archive: Nature—which was integrated into the opening concert.
At the annual meeting in 2023, Refik Anadol focused on the fragility of coral ecosystems
Refik Anadol Studio
Fowler, Anadol says, was “much moved” by Anadol’s installation at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2021. “He enjoyed the experience and said that it was transformative,” he says. For the 2023 arts and culture programme—where the focus was specifically on the fragile coral ecosystems of the Northern Red Sea, highlighting the impact of rising sea temperatures—Anadol took his Miami concept, but in creating Artificial Realities: Coral “did a more advanced AI research and transformed an archive of more than 100 million images into a nearly 100 sq. m data sculpture in the entrance of the WEF meeting”.
Thinking large
It was the first time that Anadol had witnessed the effect of over 1,000 world leaders coming together in one room. “It is amazing that we put these people together in a moment of celebration” of focus, dialogue, and of paying attention. The piece, Anadol says, “got incredible attention” and helped prompt the UN and other bodies to focus on solutions for dying corals. “So, from a beautiful artwork, it turned into a transformative activist artwork.” Through the presentation he met world leaders, policy makers and expert scientists.
For the January 2024 opening concert, Fowler commissioned Living Archive: Nature, two works relating to the Brazilian rainforest and the Sahara desert, that Anadol derived from his Large Nature Model (LNM), an AI system built in collaboration with some of the largest public archives of natural history data. The participating institutions from whom Anadol sourced data include the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, holders of 148 million objects, nine million public specimen records and 6.3 million public images; the Natural History Museum in London, which has 80 million specimens and four million public images; the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York state, which holds 54 million images, two million sound recordings and 255,000 videos; the crowd-sourced iNaturalist, home to 181 million images; the data-aggregation platform Encyclopedia of Life; and herbarium and botanical gardens collections in Paris, New York, Harvard University and Rio de Janeiro, among other places.
The project saw Anadol named a cultural leader alongside his mentor, Chief Nixiwaka Yawanawá of the Yawanawá people in Brazil, with whom he had been working for several years. Anadol and his wife and studio co-founder, Efsun Erkılıç, have spent time with the Yawanawá in the rainforest near the Peruvian border, in a collaboration that deeply influenced their work on rainforest AI models.
Living Archive: Nature at Davos was the beginning of a global tour of exhibitions derived from Anadol’s LNM, starting with Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, at Serpentine North, in London, the artist’s first solo show in the city. In successive months, Anadol presented his LNM in various guises at Nvidia GTC, the chipmaker’s AI conference in San José, and at the Google IO AI research event in Mountain View (both in California), followed by presentations last September at the Leaders’ Summit at the UN headquarters in New York and in the form of eight themed works at Futura Seoul, in South Korea. For environmental projects at the UN and for WEF, Anadol now produces work through his studio’s non-profit RAS AI Foundation.
And now the LNM, launched at Davos in 2024, comes full circle, featuring in this year’s Guardians of the Glaciers opening concert. “When Joseph invited me,” Anadol says, “I said absolutely; let’s just make this even better.”
