Stride

Dear friends, I’m excited to share our final and most ambitious AI arts project for 2025 — Machine Dreams: Biophilia, commissioned by Google for their new headquarters, Gradient Canopy. The project began nearly two years ago to support Large Nature Model research. To create this work, Refik Anadol Studio collected 2 petabytes of audio and imagery from four distinct California biomes by traveling through the Redwoods, Ocean, Bay, and Foothills. It was combined with publicly available ecological datasets to train our Large Nature Model (LNM) sustainably in Google Cloud using renewable energy. Local weather data from each biome is used in real time to generate text prompts in the latest Gemini, guiding the LNM’s exploration of the datasets. As the weather changes, so do the dreamed images and evolving soundscapes, reflecting nature’s constant motion—a living AI Data Painting that harmonizes perfectly with nature. The breakthrough technology behind the artwork will also power Dataland, and I cannot wait to share more soon. I am deeply grateful to the team that worked so hard on this epic and unique project, and to Google Leadership and scientists for their ongoing support of our studio since 2015!