I have to admit to being a bit dubious when it was revealed two years ago that the world's first AI art museum would open beside The Broad and the Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art. Dataland was announced at a time when the term 'AI art' was more commonly used to refer to Midjourney maulings of Greg Rutkowski's fantasy art style.
But the history of AI art began long before the era of AI slop. Since the dawn of the computer age, artists have explored the use of data and algorithms to create art. Dataland combines that experimental spirit with the contemporary furor for immersive experiences. Its inaugural exhibition opened last week, and suffice it to say, there isn't a Ghiblified meme or a video of Will Smith eating spaghetti in sight. So what on Earth's in it?
Founded by the digital artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, Dataland spans five galleries covering some 25,000 square feet. Its first exhibition, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, is presented as an immersive exploration of living artworks that explore one of the planet’s most complex and vital ecosystems.
Interconnected environments are created in real-time by the Refik Anadol Studio's Large Nature Model, an AI system that the studio says was trained on an ethically curated ecological archive that combines data from leading research institutions and environmental organisations with original datasets gathered through fieldwork and direct observation of nature.
The exhibition seeks to transform this hard rainforest intelligence into living environments through image, sound, scent and interaction. Visitors can choose to connect themselves to the museum through two wearable devices: a wrist-worn medical-grade biosensor that takes real-time measurements of heart rates and skin temperature and conductivity, and a device worn around the neck that delivers an individualised scent journey for each visitor.
The idea is that this plugging in to the exhibition creates a living dialogue between art and the viewer that's facilitated by a machine but unique to each visitor.
One of the galleries is called the Data Pavilion. Vast visuals unfold across across eighty-four synchronised high-resolution projectors that transform walls and ceilings into a shifting canvas, enveloped by a two-hundred-channel spatial soundscape composed live from rainforest data.
The tracking systems allow each visitor’s presence to influence the evolving sensory landscape. Heartbeat data is transformed into sonic patterns that vary according to spatial position and movement. Eight molecular scent compositions, developed with L’Oréal Luxe, release in sequence as the work unfolds, from the the scent of tropical fruit to damp of fungus on the forest floor and "the musk of unseen fauna"
The exhibition also involves an element of active participation. The Latent Gallery allows visitors to explore data archives, discover hidden patterns and perform their own experiments and data paintings at interactive stations.
The're also a culinary programme that uses ecological data on a species' habitat, climate and chemistry and translates it into flavour profiles that are then used in the kitchen as infusions and tasting elements. "The data becomes edible," the museum says.
A third gallery called the Infinity Room hosts a piece called the The Dream of Ruwe Pinu, which was apparently inspired by a dream that Refik had interpreted by a Yawanawá spiritual leader on a trip to the Amazon.
Finally Gallery D, The Sanctuary, was conceived as a more contemplative environment where the accumulated record of data captured from visitors' wearable devices – the studio describes this as "collective emotional temperature" – is woven into a thirty-foot data painting. The artwork also produces the molecular signature of the Amazonian moonflower, a rare blossom that opens for a single night each year.
With an exhibit that involves AI and themes of nature, there's an inevitable discord around the environmental impact of artificial intelligence. Google says its cloud infrastructure, on which the Large Nature Model runs is powered by 87% carbon-free renewable compute, but it's hard to avoid the tension with the controversies around the impact of AI data centres.
There are also many people who will argue that no form of AI art can truly be art, and that the person who creates it is an 'AI user' not an 'AI artist'. I'd argue that it's hard to deny that, beyond the technology, Dataland is generating the kind of experience that people have had for millennia at places of worship and later museums, sharing silent moments of contemplation and wonder with strangers. I'd say that this makes what inside a form of art.
It's Instagrammable art as entertainment, but this immersive experience is deeper and more thought-provoking than projections of moving Van Gogh paintings on a wall, and it raises interesting questions about how our concept of art and of museums could evolve. This museum has a brain, of sorts, which processes and responds to data in real time, both from within its own walls and from places many miles away, all melding it all in real time. It changes the concept of a museum from a vessel for hosting the artistic experience to something we plug into to feed and feed from.
“For 5000 years humans have been emotionally moved by artworks, but the relationship has always flowed in one direction,” Anadol has said. “While developing Dataland we asked ourselves, ‘Is it possible for artworks to feel us back?’”
Dataland is located at Frank Gehry’s The Grand LA at 100 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles. Machine Dreams: Rainforest, runs until Jan 31, 2027. In July, the museum intends to announce details of its first artist residency program, developed with Google Arts & Culture to support creatives working with machine intelligence,
Tickets can be booked online through the website.
