AI meets art talk at Jeffery Deitch Gallery with
Refik Anadol, Parag K. Mital, and Devang Thakkar

An exclusive evening with pioneering media artists and AI art experts exploring how AI changes art and the art market, as well as diving into its societal and cultural implications. 

Speakers:

Refik Anadol is an internationally renowned media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. He is also a lecturer in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts. His work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. Taking the data that surrounds us as primary material, and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol offers us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expands the possibilities of the arts, architecture, narrative, and the body in motion.

Anadol’s site-specific AI data sculptures, live audiovisual performances, and environmental installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, decentralized networks, collective experience, and the creative potential of machines.
Anadol’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Centre Pompidou-Metz, National Gallery of Victoria, Venice Architecture Biennale, Hammer Museum, Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Ars Electronica Festival, Istanbul Design Biennial, and ZKM | Center for Art and New Media. In 2018, Anadol collaborated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for WDCH Dreams, a live audio-visual performance projected on the façade of Frank Gehry’s iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall in celebration of the orchestra’s centennial. Refik Anadol: Unsupervised, the artist’s first solo North American museum presentation, is currently on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Parag K. Mital, Ph.D. (US) is an Indian American artist and interdisciplinary researcher working between computational arts and machine learning for nearly 20 years. He currently works as CTO and Head of research at HyperSurfaces working on AI audio research and at Never Before Heard Sounds as their Chief AI Scientist. His varied scientific background includes fields such as machine and deep learning, film cognition, eye-tracking studies, EEG and fMRI research. His artistic practice combines generative film experiences, augmented reality hallucinations, and expressive control of large audiovisual corpora, tackling questions of identity, memory, and the nature of perception. The balance between his scientific and arts practice allows both to reflect on each other: the science driving the theories, and the artwork re-defining the questions asked within the research.

His work has been published and exhibited internationally including the Prix Ars Electronica, Walt Disney Concert Hall, ACM Multimedia, Victoria & Albert Museum, London’s Science Museum, Oberhausen Short Film Festival, and the British Film Institute, and featured in press including BBC, NYTimes, FastCompany, and others. He has also taught at UCLA, University of Edinburgh, Goldsmiths, University of London, Dartmouth College, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, and California Institute of the Arts in both Undergraduate and Graduate levels in primarily computational arts applied courses focusing on machine learning applications. Finally, he is also a frequent collaborator with artists and cultural institutes such as Massive Attack, Sigur Rós, David Lynch, Google, Es Devlin, and Refik Anadol Studio.

Devang Thakkar is Global Head of Christie’s Ventures. Thakkar is a multi-disciplinary product, technology, and business leader who currently advises a portfolio of companies in the luxury and tech space on a wide array of areas ranging from innovation, marketing to fundraising. From 2015-2019, Thakkar was VP of Consumer Marketplace at Artsy, the world’s leading and largest online platform for collecting and discovering art. Where he lead Artsy’s efforts in enhancing the art buying and selling experience with the goal of increasing participation and expanding the overall art market. Thakkar also oversaw the build out of Artsy’s auctions business, which provides buyers and sellers access to art auctions across the globe presented by premier auction houses. Before joining Artsy in 2015, Thakkar spent 11 years at Microsoft in Seattle where he contributed to the development of major operating systems from Windows XP to Windows 10 and product lines such as Bing apps, MSN. His last product at Microsoft was Microsoft Teams. Thakkar holds master’s degrees in economics and Computer Science from Columbia University and an MBA in Finance from the University of Washington.

He is also an artist – he paints and maintains a studio practice.

Moderator:

Katie Peyton Hofstadter is a Los Angeles-based writer, artist and curator. Her work explores the role of artists and writers in co-creating systems for the present and for the imagined, near future. Her most recent curated exhibition, LIFELIKE, can be viewed virtually at epoch.gallery; the expanded exhibition will open at Vellum / LA March 16, and at Cal Poly University in fall 2023. She has co-founded several international art campaigns, including #MakeUsVisible and the Climate Clock monument, as well as Future Art Models, a project in prefigurative imagination commissioned by apexart. She is a contributor to Flash Art, The Believer, BOMB, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and Right Click Save. For the past ten years, she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at Parsons, The New School, and F.I.T., including writing, curating, and public programming for the arts.

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