Refik Anadol’s Dataland, billed as the world’s first museum dedicated to art made with artificial intelligence, is set to throw open its doors on June 20 in downtown Los Angeles. Co-founded by Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, the new institution lands inside the Frank Gehry-designed Grand LA complex, just steps from Walt Disney Concert Hall. Its inaugural show, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, promises room-sized projections, scent and immersive sound that aim to sketch out a machine’s sensory portrait of the Amazon.
The opening date and debut exhibition were announced this week, according to the Los Angeles Times. The paper reports that the show grew out of a trip to the Amazon and will rely on vast data sets to pull visitors into an AI-generated environment. "It's very exciting to say that AI art is not image only," Anadol told the Times, describing Dataland as a "living museum."
The tech powering the museum
Dataland will run on Refik Anadol Studio’s Large Nature Model, an open-access, nature-focused AI platform that the project says draws on institutional archives and field data to render living, generative works, according to the museum's Dataland. The model's development involves partnerships with institutions including the Smithsonian, London's Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the site notes. The artist has previously described the datasets that feed the model as encompassing "up to half a billion images," per Time, and the system will run on Google Cloud servers in Oregon, which Google reports have an 87% carbon-free energy mix.
The space and the galleries
The museum sits inside The Grand LA and covers roughly 35,000 square feet, with about 25,000 devoted to public space and 10,000 reserved for its technical operations, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. DATALAND was designed in collaboration with Gensler and engineered with Arup, the developer said in a press release, and will feature five immersive galleries, a 30-foot ceiling and an escalator that carries guests down into the installations. The project has declined to share construction costs, but organizers say the site will also function as a public repository for AI-created work and research.
What this means for L.A.
Dataland joins a wave of splashy museum projects reshaping Los Angeles’s cultural map this year, from LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries to other major openings, The Art Newspaper notes. Refik Anadol and his team say Dataland will blend public programming, research and a permanent collection of AI works; ticketing and membership details are available or forthcoming on the museum's Dataland. For locals, the new spot is pitched as a sensory-forward, tech-driven addition to Grand Avenue that its backers hope will nudge people to rethink what machine-made art can be.
