CODAME Dreaming with Refik at the Guggenheim Bilbao
From SPACE to Bilbao: Refik Anadol ✕ CODAME ART+TECH
Walking into the Guggenheim Bilbao, we stepped into a techno-architectural dreamscape bringing back memories. Just like at our CODAME ART+TECH 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 ART+TECH Festival, themed『 SPACE 』His Machine Hallucinations became the festival’s visual identity and poster, turning NASA’s massive Mars image archive into dreamlike visions of the Red Planet.
![ART+TECH Festival [2019]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3ts0!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F05efae91-18d3-4ec3-ad6f-5cce90808cef_600x927.jpeg)
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.
✨ Other Artists Who Sparked Our Curiosity
Our Guggenheim adventure didn’t end with Anadol. Around every corner, the museum revealed new worlds—iconic voices and bold visions that challenged us, surprised us, and reminded us that innovation takes many forms. As we wandered the galleries, it felt like stepping into a living conversation between past and future, tradition and technology, with each artwork adding its own resonance to the dialogue.
It was a true honor to see a CODAME featured artist presented in the company of such legendary creators:
Barbara Kruger surrounded us with giant text and images, bold questions about truth, power, and identity wrapping around walls and floors. It felt like stepping into a dialogue where the art doesn’t just hang—it argues, provokes, demands.
Helen Frankenthaler showed us what happens when you ignore the rules and let curiosity lead. Her flowing colors and fearless experiments with technique reminded us that “technology” isn’t always digital—sometimes it’s paint, canvas, and gravity bending to a new vision.
El Anatsui: Rising Sea shimmered like a giant textile made of thousands of recycled bottle caps, transforming waste into waves. It’s collaboration with materials, with histories, with the planet itself—a powerful reminder that creativity and sustainability go hand in hand.
Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrored Room – A Wish for Human Happiness Calling from Beyond the Universe pulled us into endless reflections, multiplying our presence into universes of light. A playful reminder that sometimes art is less about looking at something and more about being inside it.
Richard Serra: The Matter of Time immersed us in towering steel spirals, where walking becomes part of the artwork itself. It’s a timeless exploration of space, weight, and movement—architecture as sculpture, sculpture as experience.
These were only a few, but each of these voices spoke differently, but all resonated with CODAME’s love for experimentation, curiosity, and playful collisions of ideas.
You can find the full list of artists and their work on the current Guggenheim Bilbao Exhibition on guggenheim-bilbao.eus
💜 Join Us in the Play
We left Bilbao grateful, inspired, and more convinced than ever that ART+TECH is not about machines replacing creativity, but about expanding how we play, explore, and imagine—together.
That’s what CODAME is all about: creating spaces where artists, technologists, and dreamers from all walks of life can meet, collaborate, and spark new possibilities. None of it would happen without our amazing volunteer team and the support of those who believe in the power of curiosity and collaboration.
After all, “space is a canvas,” whether that space is a faraway planet, a Frank Gehry museum gallery, or the creative community we continue to build together.
Shout-out to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao for an unforgettable experience, and to Refik Anadol for continuing to expand the boundaries of ART+TECH. We returned home energized, our minds expanded and our hearts full. In true CODAME fashion, we’re already channeling that inspiration into our next adventures—always for the love of ART♥TECH and the belief that collaboration + exploration = pure creative alchemy.
See you on the next art+tech journey! 🚀
✨ Want to be part of it? You can volunteer 🤝, show your work 🎨, sponsor 🌟, or donate 💖 to help us keep growing playful spaces where ART♥TECH collide.