How Musician Refik Anadol Made the 2025 TIME 100 AI Cover

Referred to as the Large Nature Model by worldwide renowned Turkish-American media musician Anadol and his group, his modular multimodal AI system is the product of comprehensive research study and partnership. According to Anadol’s workshop, the model was educated on “the most considerable, ethically gathered dataset of the natural world,” integrating over half a billion images from the archives of companies including the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Organization, and London’s Nature Gallery with data accumulated directly from 16 jungles. Anadol, whose work has been displayed at organizations including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, London’s Serpentine Galleries, and the Guggenheim Gallery Bilbao also collaborated with tech titans Nvidia and Google Cloud, which offered computing resources, while designs such as Meta’s Llama and Google’s Gemini play a series of duties under the hood.

The design deconstructed each TIME cover, drawing out information on thematic and historical context, and utilizing this data as a punctual. Anadol clarifies they ran the system in 2 modes: “future cover” and “archive desire.” For the first, the objective was to use “the patterns of the past hundred years to create paths to confident futures,” picturing hypothetical covers starring coming heroes that could someday usage AI to fix historic problems. Others include those individuals executing jobs that do not yet exist– like a “symbiotic architect, that makes structures that are integrated living environments,” or a “chief memory curator, in charge of archiving our electronic and physical past.” As Anadol puts it, “Can we make use of AI to fantasize brand-new jobs? Can we use AI to discover solutions to issues we created?”

While these thought of futures informed the task’s theoretical structure, the final cover emerged from the second setting–“archive dream”– which represents a synthesis of TIME’s archive, infiltrated his sensibilities. The core picture was AI-generated, while the cover’s information– like its message, gallery context, and Anadol’s silhouette, consisted of for a sense of range– were human-directed: “true human-machine cooperation,” he states. Online, the cover can be considered as a seamless looping video clip.

While the job is evocative his successful 2022 event , “Without supervision,” at MoMA, which brought in almost 3 million people, Anadol clarifies the conceptual and technical foundation of each job are fundamentally different, each representing a different course for machine-driven imagination. For MoMA, the goal was to have the system develop its very own visual reasoning. With TIME, Anadol desired his naturalist system to be responsive to human background. “Eventually, this job is an invitation. The future is not a taken care of destination to be scared of, but a fluid truth we can in fact form,” he says.