What’s Happening: The Turkish-American digital artist is inaugurating Las Vegas’s new Sphere with his swirling, real-time generated digital collages of space and nature. Not only a staggering feat of technical ingenuity, it cements the Populous-designed venue as a platform for high-concept artwork in a city still lacking a major art institution.

The Download: Refik Anadol’s hallucinatory visuals, which pull from data sets to display dynamic collages of imagery taken from outer space and the deep sea, have recast a multitude of hallowed venues into breathtaking canvases for his swirling abstractions. The recent settings need no introduction: Walt Disney Concert Hall, the stage for this year’s Grammy Awards, Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló, and the Museum of Modern Art’s cavernous Gund Lobby. Each venue presents its own technical challenges the Turkish-American digital artist and computer programmer needed to overcome, but the latest is his most ambitious undertaking yet in terms of both style and scale.

That’s because he’s inaugurating the soon-to-debut Sphere in Las Vegas, the 366-foot-tall Populous-designed venue whose globe-shaped exterior is clad in 580,000 square feet of programmable LED screens. (When viewed from afar, it’s essentially the world’s largest screen and a “Blade Runner moment,” Anadol quips.) Projected on the surface are the latest installments of his Machine Hallucinations—a series he began seven years ago during a Google AI residency—that plugs publicly available images into machine-learning models that create hundreds of colorful abstractions. Two debut on the Sphere: Space, which pulls raw footage from the Hubble Space Telescope, and Nature, where 400 million images of flora and fauna are animated by data of gust speeds and air pressure captured by local sensors.

The canvas, of course, is anything but square, requiring extra legwork to get right. Anadol applied his real-time generated artwork to an equidistant cylindrical projection, a type of model that produces flat maps from spheres. That equirectangular projection then seamlessly wraps the sphere with Anadol’s artwork. The existential themes interwoven in space travel—as well as the technical ingenuity required to execute such high-concept artwork at a monumental scale—may contradict Sin City’s penchant for quick thrills and blacked-out blurs. If executed well, though, the Sphere can potentially bring high-concept artwork to a city still woefully lacking a major institution beyond the Neon Boneyard. To wit, Darren Aronofsky created an immersive sci-fi documentary, Postcard from Earth, specifically for the new venue. Here’s to hoping that giant blinking eyeballs don’t take up too much screen time.

In Their Own Words: “To me, it’s questioning reality,” Anadol tells the Los Angeles Times. “[It’s] this incredible architectural form in public urban space and this incredible art form. We’re used to canvas and sculpture and paintings and video, but this time, the whole building is a canvas—and not one with corners. It’s challenging our perceptions. It’s a really powerful statement and experiment reinterpreting the limits of our understanding of what is a canvas.”

Surface Says: We’d love to see Ralph Steadman try to illustrate this one.

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Stepping into the latest debut from Mexican hitmakers Grupo Habita is like diving into a tactile narrative of Oaxaca’s rich cultural tapestry. Designed by local architects RootStudio, the 16-room Otro Oaxaca is a labyrinthine wonder—interlocking pavilions and shadowed corridors, all adorned with a medley of brick, limestone, raw concrete, and reclaimed wood.

Perched on the edge of the 16th-century Santo Domingo de Guzmán plaza, the hotel lures you to its rooftop for mezcal cocktails, offering panoramic views that make even the most jaded traveler pause. Here, every element is an ode to regional traditions, from the earthy interiors to chef Saúl Carranza’s locally sourced fare seared on an open grill. The pièce de résistance? An underground spa featuring a cenote-inspired plunge pool, crowned by a celestial brick-domed oculus streaming a beam of sunlight.

When visitors to the recently opened second edition of Frieze Seoul aren’t navigating a raucous sea of crowds and booths, they may be getting an up-close-and-personal look at a delicate array of draped fabrics that may stoke a reckoning with their own biases. Suspended from the ceiling of the Coex exhibition center is The Great Ballroom, an installation by local artist Woo Hannah, the inaugural recipient of Frieze Seoul’s Artist Award with Bulgari. Reminiscent of hanging curtains in a ballroom and the frilly dresses worn by lovers in Fragonard paintings, the draped fabrics bring to mind the shape of women’s breasts.

To create the components, Woo constructs the structural shells from fabric and stuffs them with varying amounts of cotton to control the tension, calling to mind taut or wrinkled skin. “I began to understand the fabric as a kind of skin,” Woo says. “Depending on the intensity of the wrinkles formed by the amount of fabric, we can talk about aging.” The inevitability of decay, and our own ageist tendencies, are at the forefront. “There are gazes in mainstream culture that have a tendency to really flatten women,” Woo says, noting how her physical age will soon pass the ideal age for reproduction, and questioning what it means to her. “All living things have a life cycle, and as each being makes its way through, there are different stages of aging. I think every single one of those stages is so important and beautiful.”

When: Until Nov. 4

Where: Hannah Traore Gallery, New York

What: The Philadelphia-born photographer turns his lens to an interpretation of Black masculinity in a process that asks viewers to let down their guard and cast aside preconceptions. His intimate portraits of friends and peers use elements like leather, lace, fishnets, and bondage to center sensual beauty. The breadth of queer iconography within each image lays bare his radical courage to create and live freely. “Younger me would not even take these images,” he says. “Half my family is Muslim and half Christian. To be able to do this took a lot of healing, self-acceptance, and bravery, to be able to just walk out of my house and be a Black gay person. I would truly rather die than to not live my life as freely as I do. I don’t want to die with what ifs and having questions as to if I was ever my true self.”

Rodents taking up residence in cities is a tale as old as time, but Rome’s pest population, which numbers seven million, or 2.5 rats to every person, appears to be sparking unease among visitors to the Colosseum. The city’s garbage collection authority, overseen by Sabrina Alfonsi, is undertaking a “special intervention,” according to Reuters, to manage the trash overflow believed to be attracting pests. Alfonsi referenced the summer heat and influx of tourists as factors in this year’s conspicuous population, which, given their well-documented intelligence, may thwart the city’s best-laid pest management plans.

Since 1820, Puiforcat has been the signature silversmith of the world’s connoisseurs and collectors of exceptional objects. With a rich heritage of 10,000 hollow-ware pieces and more than 100 varieties of flatware, Puiforcat is one of the rare French houses that has preserved its heritage and maintained expertise in its workshop in the field of Haute Orfèvrerie.

Surface Says: With a history nearly two centuries long, Puiforcat might be expected to be set in its ways. That is certainly not the case. The brand continues to produce some of today’s most creative silver pieces. We especially like its Bureau d’architects collection with Joseph Dirand.

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Enter a remote Albanian town that social media has emptied over the years.