Data Tunnel: Galleria Bombi

Refik Anadol Studio proposes an immersive AI Data Sculpture to be displayed inside Galleria Bombi, reimagining the newly redeveloped passage as a cognitive and aesthetic threshold—what the philosopher Michel Serres might call a “fold in experience.” Building on the Studio’s prior experimentation with this uniquely resonant tunnel structure, the work transforms the linearity of transit into a meditative journey through the deep time of nature. In this environment, data is not static information, but a living material—raw, dynamic, and sensorial.

The artwork draws from Refik Anadol Studio’s Large Nature Model (LNM), a cutting-edge AI system trained on visual, auditory, and ecological data from diverse biomes. As the visitor moves through Galleria Bombi, they are surrounded by the latent dreams of nature—botanical textures, oceanic pulses, atmospheric rhythms—rendered in generative motion.

This intervention, titled Data Tunnel, is both a conceptual and technical window into the Studio’s broader research, which spans scientific inquiry, environmental archives, and machine creativity. The artwork presents nature-based datasets in their transitional states: not yet image, not yet form, but in flux—visualized moments from the transformation of data into pigment, painting, and sculpture. By rendering these transitional states visible, Data Tunnel stages the poetics of process, the simultaneity of abstraction and precision.