Hi. I'm Refik. I'm a media artist.
I use data as a pigment
and paint with a thinking brush
that is assisted
by artificial intelligence.
Using architectural spaces as canvases,
I collaborate with machines
to make buildings dream and hallucinate.
You may be wondering,
what does all this mean?
So let me please take you
into my work and my world.
I witnessed the power of imagination
when I was eight years old
as a child growing up in Istanbul.
One day, my mom brought home
a videocassette
of the science fiction movie
"Blade Runner."
I clearly remember being mesmerized
by the stunning architectural vision
of the future of Los Angeles,
a place that I had never seen before.
That vision became a kind of a staple
of my daydreams.
When I arrived in LA in 2012
for a graduate program
in design media arts,
I rented a car and drove downtown
to see that wonderful world
of the near future.
I remember a specific line
that kept playing
over and over in my head:
the scene where the android Rachael
realizes that her memories
are actually not hers,
and when Deckard tells her
they are someone else's memories.
Since that moment,
one of my inspirations
has been this question.
What can a mission do
with someone else's memories?
Or, to say that in another way,
what does it mean to be an AI
in the 21st century?
Any android or AI mission
is only intelligent
as long as we collaborate with it.
It can construct things
that human intelligence
intends to produce,
but does not have the capacity to do so.
Think about your activities
and social networks.
For example, they get smarter
the more you interact with them.
If machines can learn or process memories,
can they also dream?
Hallucinate?
Involuntarily remember,
or make connections
between multiple people streams?
Does being an AI in the 21st century
simply mean not forgetting anything?