Geophysical reality and machine dreams meld together to often mesmerizing effect in Refik Anadol’s revelatory exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch. The show is at once an ode to the elemental forces shaping the earth’s outdoor spaces (and the human mind’s internal ones) and the aesthetics of data analysis. The show’s title, “Living Paintings,” is more than a gimmick; it shows the artist staunchly situating his AI-augmented visions within familiar rectilinear frameworks of artistic convention—a gesture which flaunts his dual affinities both to modernist art history and computer data modeling. Still, for all its goopy, data-derived abstraction, the core of the work lies in using data to interrogate our world, then using aesthetics to interrogate the data.

To most Angelenos, the Istanbul-born, UCLA-trained Anadol is best known for creating the ebullient exterior projections for Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2018, and imagery from that project is included in this exhibition. But overall, the show has more in common with his recent installation at MoMA, which used digital archives and AI to concoct dreamlike images based on the museum’s collections. Here, the collections include images of California’s national parks and environmental data from the Pacific Ocean, such as wind speeds, which are filtered through algorithms to create fluid visualizations. A dozen of these “AI data paintings” are presented in vertical rectangular formats girding three-dimensional abstractions that are constantly morphing and mutating. The ones derived from California scenic vistas are the most recognizable, while ones based on Pacific Ocean data offer churning fields of blue. The set titled Artificial Realities, California Landscapes are especially vivid, lapping at their boxy digital frames like some form of liquid intelligence threatening to surge out of their containers into our dimension.

Eager viewers—and the day I saw the show there were mobs of them—could experience the work to more potent effect in a large horizontal viewing gallery, along with ambient soundtrack. Here, the swirling abstractions, which vaguely suggest lapping tongues, kelp-like membranes, or giant churning potato chips, become immersive and hallucinatory, continually dissolving into tiny globules of color. But while we know it stems from real-world data, as interpreted by the artist’s 16-person studio team, that data’s significance remains submerged within the effusive display. Most striking in its elegant hyper-reality is the series titled Artificial Realities: Coral Dreams, in which twiglike scarlet corals nestle amidst billowy swells of salmon, white and teal, that suggest a fusion of driftwood, motion-capture waves, and buttery frosting.

Perhaps the show’s most unnerving work is a set of swirling white, molded CNC abstractions sourced from measurements of human memories: a heady, sci-fi concept if there ever was one. Applying formal analysis to them seems not just quaint but pointless. Oddly compelling and vaguely illustrative, Anadol’s fluid, data-driven abstractions feel like a liminal stage in the fusion of information, technology and art; framing aesthetic experience as a vibrant, computer-aided spectacle, reflecting back to us the dynamism and seductiveness of our ever-evolving digital environment, and the strangeness of the world around us.