'Blade Runner' blew his mind. Now this artist uses AI to explore human consciousness.

Blade Runner pictures Los Angeles in 2019 with flying cars, neon signs, and massive video ads. It’s an urban portrait that looks more like today’s New York City than L.A., and watching it brought Istanbul-born artist Refik Anadol to Times Square almost eight years ago.

In November, his solo exhibition "Machine Hallucination" brought him back to New York. The immersive installation, currently on display at a boiler room–turned-art space in Chelsea, marries artificial intelligence and audiovisual technology to imagine New York's cityscape in 512 dimensions. 

Based in L.A., Anadol arrived from Houston the day before we met. He had just spoken at an artificial intelligence summit about the intersection of human creativity and machine learning — the subject of many of his works. Read more...