CODAME Dreaming with Refik at the Guggenheim Bilbao
By Refik Anadol
From SPACE to Bilbao: [Refik Anadol](/artists/refik-anadol) ✕ [CODAME ART+TECH](/orgs/codame/events/codame-arttech-c1a) Walking into the Guggenheim Bilbao, we stepped into a techno-architectural dreamscape bringing back memories. Just like at our [CODAME ART+TECH](/orgs/codame/events/coming-soon) Festivals, Refik Anadol’s Living Architecture: Gehry made the museum itself feel alive, walls shifting, data flowing, forms transforming before our eyes. Using a custom AI model trained on 35 million images of Frank Gehry’s sketches and plans, the work unfolds in six chapters, from Data Universe to Machine Hallucination and finally Dreams . Back in 2019 , Refik joined our [CODAME](/orgs/codame) [ART+TECH Festival](/orgs/codame/events/codame-art-tech-festival-2013) , themed『 SPACE 』His [Machine Hallucinations](/orgs/codame/projects/machine-hallucinations) became the festival’s visual identity and poster, turning NASA’s massive Mars image archive into dreamlike visions of the Red Planet. Fast forward to 2025: seeing Living Architecture: Gehry felt like witnessing an evolution of that same visionary spirit. Instead of outer space, Anadol now aims his algorithms at architectural space – yet the ethos is similar. Just as Mars Machine Hallucination gave us a new way to imagine a distant planet, Living Architecture gives us a new way to imagine an iconic building. In both, data becomes art, and the invisible (whether Martian topography or Gehry’s design language) is made visible and mesmerizing. No wonder we were geeking out! We were proud to see an artist who, as we celebrate on our CODAME profile , “explores the space among digital and physical entities by creating a hybrid relationship between architecture and media arts with machine intelligence” —now wowing international audiences on such a grand stage. It also reminded us of the 2019 festival’s core inspiration. As CODAME co-founder said, “Space is a canvas on which we write our stories, paint our dreams, and build our realities.” In Bilbao, that concept of space as canvas rang truer than ever: whether the infinite cosmos or a museum’s atrium, space is something to be filled with creative dreams. Anadol, a long-time CODAME collaborator, embodies this idea from the『 SPACE 』festival’s Martian data art to this week’s architectural AI fantasia. It’s a joy to see how far these explorations go, and it fuels our own passion to keep pushing the frontier where art meets technology. At CODAME, we’re powered by passionate volunteers and a mission to playfully explore where art and technology meet. Refik’s journey from CODAME Featured Artist to filling an entire Guggenheim gallery is proof of that vision: ART+TECH can expand how we perceive and inhabit our world.