PIONEER TOWER COMMISSIONED ARTIST | Refik Anadol
Refik Anadol (b. 1985) is a media artist and director. Born in Istanbul, Turkey, he currently lives and works in Los Angeles where he is a lecturer and visiting researcher at UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts. His works explore the space between digital and physical entities by creating a hybrid relationship between architecture and the media arts using machine intelligence. This connection is exhibited through live audio/visual performance and immersive installations, as well as in site-specific public artworks, using a parametric data sculpture approach.
Refik Anadol Studio was commissioned by the City of Fort Worth to create a projection mapping video artwork to be presented on the historic 204-foot Pioneer Tower at the Will Rogers Memorial Center in the Cultural District. Selected based on a proposal titled, Pioneer Tower Dreams, the artist sought to “celebrate the people, places, histories, and dreams of the city that have been woven together through interpersonal and social interactions over the years”. Acknowledging that place and memory are directly linked, Anadol takes into careful consideration the physical environment and key buildings which physicalize the sentiment of home for many.
In order to create a piece that reflects Fort Worth, archival data was gathered from key libraries and museums, institutions, and community members*. These memories contributed to a vast pool of data which was processed by machine-learning algorithms and transformed into a dreamlike visualization of Fort Worth’s collective memory. Anadol’s work ultimately explored the consciousness of Fort Worth previously unseen. The final audio/visual performance was projected onto the façades of Pioneer Tower, becoming a collective performance and journey into the imagination, memories, and dreams of the city of Fort Worth.
