For WDCH Dreams Refik Anadol Studio collaborated with The Los Angeles Philharmonic to help celebrate their 100th anniversary by creating both a week-long public art installation and a season-long immersive exhibition. The home of the Philharmonic, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, was built in 2003 and designed by Frank Gehry. After building the concert hall he had famously hoped that the beauty of the music created within its walls would one day be reflected outside. If a building such as Walt Disney Concert Hall could share it’s memories, if its “consciousness” came to life, perhaps we could also imagine a new trajectory for architecture itself. 

Working with the Artists and Machine Intelligence program and researcher Parag K. Mital we applied machine intelligence to the orchestra’s digital archives — nearly 45 terabytes of data — 587,763 image files, 1,880 video files, 1,483 metadata files, and 17,773 audio files (the equivalent of 40,000 hours of audio from 16,471 performances). Through the use of machine learning algorithms, Anadol and his team developed data sculptures based on the machine’s interpretation of the LA Phil’s digital archives. These sculptures were projected  directly onto the undulating stainless-steel exterior of Walt Disney Concert Hall through the use of 42 large scale projectors with 50K visual resolution, 8-channel sound, and 1.2M luminance in total. This project’s radical visualization of the organization’s first century was both an exploration of synergies between art and technology as well as architecture and institutional memory.