ZURICH.- With his striking visualization of the beauty and fragility of the world’s glaciers, Refik Anadol aims to draw attention to climate change while at the same time creating a multi-sensory viewing experience. ‘Glacier Dreams’ is an immersive digital room which combines art, technology and the issue of climate in spectacular fashion. This work, which is being shown in Zurich for the first time, looks set to become another favourite of visitors to the Kunsthaus. It was donated to the Kunsthaus Zürich by Bank Julius Baer and will be on show from 18 January.

AI, Big Data and the quantified self: the digital transformation is one of the most important developments of our times. Computers and new technologies are shaping every aspect of our lives. The Kunsthaus is rising to the challenge, too, using bold experimentation to reflect on the artistic potential and social impact of media technologies.

Refik Anadol (b. 1985 in Istanbul, lives in Los Angeles) is one of the leading pioneers of AI-based art. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has given a prominent place to his work ‘Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations’ and acquired it for its permanent collection. Anadol’s art has been shown at venues including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and in exhibitions at, for example, London’s Serpentine Gallery in spring 2024.

In his spectacular piece ‘Glacier Dreams’ (2023), Anadol ventures a step further, using AI to engage with one of the most pressing issues of our time – climate change. ‘Glacier Dreams’ is a multi-sensory AI artwork commissioned by Julius Baer as part of the bank’s NEXT initiative launched in 2022, which promotes new forms of cultural production at the intersection of the arts, science, and technology, and encourages the exploration of megatrends. To make it, Refik Anadol used over 100 million images from online and institutional archives as well as an additional dataset which he put together himself, comprising more than 10 million visuals of glaciers from Iceland, Greenland and the Antarctic. Going beyond glacier research and aided by AI, Anadol creates poetic experiences with captivating images of glaciers that highlight their fragility.

At the Kunsthaus Zürich, this work is now being presented as an immersive installation that engages the entire body from all sides. Appealing to the faculties of sight, hearing and even smell, it invites visitors to reflect on the impact of melting glaciers with their senses, bodies and intellects. The LED screens, mirrors and truss cladding of the cube created specially for the work have been arranged specifically with the Kunsthaus Zürich site in mind. The result is a construction which looks like a complete sculpture from the outside and an endlessly immersive room from the inside; it can also be completely dismantled, packed up and displayed on loan at other locations. Anadol’s pixels recall the dabs of paint in the works of the Impressionist Claude Monet, whose vast, world- famous water-lily pictures – also on show at the Kunsthaus – anticipated immersive art in the medium of painting. Anadol has coined the term ‘data painting’ to describe this technique, whereby pictures no longer wait to dry, but instead take on ever-changing forms in a constant flow and thus question the idea of the artwork as a completed entity.

For Julius Baer, the donation is an expression of its close ties to its home city of Zurich and its desire to offer Kunsthaus visitors a unique experience through this important work of art.

Ann Demeester, Director of the Kunsthaus Zürich, says: ‘We would like to thank Bank Julius Baer for this important gift. In the past, the Kunsthaus has already led the way in showing and acquiring art created using what at the time were new media for its video and film collection. This generous donation complements our permanent collection and offers our visitors a stunning work of digital art.’