‘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 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.

“That movie changed my life,” the 34-year-old, cherubic artist said of Blade Runner. 

The movie first led Anadol to a psychiatrist’s office as an 8-year-old, when his mother thought he was observing his surroundings unusually the day after he saw the film. (“I was OK, I was just imagining … I was dreaming this cognitive capacity of a space,” Anadol told me.) Then, inspired by “the epic scene” of a flying car approaching a digital billboard, the artist set out for Times Square on his first-ever trip to the U.S., where he searched for a new focus as an artist.

“Times Square is the world’s most well invested media façades, where architecture becomes an interface. I was super impressed my first night, but then — no offense — I was super sad,” Anadol told me as we entered the sea of billboards. “One of the world’s best screens is just showing pure advertising. There’s no art and it doesn’t feel futuristic.” 

Anadol, whose all-black outfit had a Matrix vibe, sees himself as a futurist inspired by nostalgia. His philosophy as an AI artist who “uses architecture as a canvas” draws on how Renaissance artists used fountains to create and gather communities. 

His worldview, too, is shaped by memories of Istanbul, the city that divides Asia and Europe, east and west  — something Anadol likened to the division between the physical and virtual worlds. 

“Right now, we use this machine every morning and every night,” he told me as he pulled an iPhone from his trench coat. “What does it mean to look at this world? This world opens up another world, and that world we are trying to immerse ourselves into.” 

Anadol attempts to answer that question with Machine Hallucination.

Once we arrived, Anadol waited as the docent explained his process to visitors oblivious to the fact they were in the presence of the artist.

She described how Anadol had collected and sifted through more than 100 million archival and contemporary images of New York; fed them to an image-processing algorithm to create visions of the city’s past and future landscapes; and incorporated them into an audiovisual narrative. 

“You can stay as long as you want,” she said. “I think the record is five hours.”

Music gushed into the black room where we stood as soon as the docent opened the door to the immersive space. It sounded like pipe organs met a sci-fi movie soundtrack. 

“Technically, you’re hearing — and seeing — the city’s memories,” Anadol told me, explaining that the composition was created with the help of a neural network trained on about 100,000 hours of publicly available street recordings and broadcasts from TV and radio stations in New York. 

“Our memories are surviving in the cloud…”

“It’s kind of a glimpse of the feeling of what it means to be surrounded by the totality of collective memories,” he added when we got to the main area downstairs where people were sitting and lying on the floor. “As a humanity, our most precious quality is that memories make us who we are. 

“What I’m trying to speculate here is that we’re not anymore stuck in our memories just physically; our memories are surviving in the cloud, in social networks, in environments that we cannot touch, we cannot feel. And the more the invisible becomes visible, the more we’re aware of how these systems work.”

But Anadol said Machine Hallucination is more than just an inquiry into the nature of our memories, consciousness, and dreams — the three “chapters” of his 30-minute narrative. 

“You are in the space, you are a part of the narrative. It’s so cool that people go through this door, and it kind of becomes a part of the finale,” Anadol said as he glanced over to the exit, which blends into the installation. He said he hopes visitors walk out with questions about “what it means to be human in the 21st century” — questions to which he said he has not yet found answers. 

“That’s the journey itself,” Anadol told me, as he stood in the middle of his installation — a work that explores the future through the past, the abstract through the physical, the human through the machine. “I hope I have something.”