A site-specific multimedia artwork that turned the invisible patterns of nature in and around Dubai into a series of poetic, three-dimensional data sculptures. Wind of Dubai marked the Studio’s first permanent public art piece in the Middle East.

The artist began with harnessing a vast dataset from sensors that collect wind speed, direction, gust patterns, and temperature of Dubai and processed them through a unique algorithm specifically designed for the work.

As the machine creates its own patterns and connections between these data points, it also translates temperature data into a dynamic color palette that closely resembles the surrounding landscape.

The resulting artwork streams data into experimental Niagara features to generate fluid-form visuals – a unique visual interpretation of the fluidity of interactions between the environment and the city. Each chapter of the work bought different aspects of the data sets to life with distinct aesthetics, creating a meditative, yet provocative experience, through the machine’s capacity for simulating nature.

Wind of Dubai is permanently on display at Hotel Indigo Dubai Downtown, the guests can access it any time of the day, every day.

About Refik Anadol

Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is a media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of machine intelligence, currently residing in Los Angeles, California. His body of work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. In taking the data that flows around us as his primary material and the neural network of a computerized mind as his collaborator, Anadol paints with a thinking brush, offering us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expanding the possibilities of architecture, narrative, and the body in motion.