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?