Refik Anadol
Lilydale

T Projects worked with the South Eastern Program Alliance to lead and deliver a digital artwork that sits at the top of Lilydale station’s 27m high tower. We led a global open call to invite the world’s leading digital artists to respond to the project brief. The response was enormous with submissions from all around the world. The selected artist was multi award winning Turkish American artist Refik Anadol, an international leader in digital screen artworks. Anadol’s work combines media, science, technology, and data in site-specific works.

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The commissioned work is titled ‘Wind of Lilydale’ and is created to engage the audience in a mesmerizing play of light, which transforms the new train station into a major landmark featuring this dynamic, and multi-faceted digital artwork. The artwork is created from the analysis and artistic interpretation of vast datasets and will be a direct interpretation of Melbourne’s (famously erratic) weather patterns. Data is gathered from weather monitoring equipment capturing wind speed, direction, gust patterns, and temperature, and processed through a unique algorithm specifically designed for the commission.

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​The resulting artwork streams this data into experimental fluid motion aesthetics – a unique visual interpretation of the fluidity of interactions between the environment and the city. ‘Wind of Lilydale’   showcases a masterful utilization of cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies and scientific tools of data analysis in a mesmerizing and meditating artwork. The fluidity of the visual patterns not only perform a digital simulation of wind data, but also represent the many interlocking layers of nature, humanity, and technology. Creating an illusion of architectural multi-dimensionality and emphasizing our embeddedness in nature, ‘Wind of Lilydale’ presents an entirely new and poetic way of re-locating ourselves in the world in relation to the urban and environmental factors.

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Photo credit Peter Bennetts

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