The concept of a museum originated with the cabinets of wonders in the 16th century, rooms containing anything from shrunken heads to narwhal scales, reflecting the interests of their owners. When the collections overflowed into other rooms, they were called galleries, and a series of galleries, a museum. The world’s first public art museum, the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, dating from 1661, was founded in the Amerbach Cabinet, a private collection that includes the works of Hans Holbein the Younger.
But what if the art on display doesn’t fit into a frame or base? What if it swims across walls, floors and ceilings, and keeps changing? What if its delivery system is a series of projectors, and it’s infinite memory? Such questions may be asked by some visitors to the world’s first AI museum, DATALAND, recently opened in LA, the brainchild of Refik Anadol, generally considered the world’s first AI master, or at least the most prominent.
DATALAND occupies a Frank Gehry-designed space on Grand Avenue, across the street from the late architect’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, and includes nearly 35,000 square feet, 10,000 of which house state-of-the-art production servers. Upon entry, visitors descend an escalator into the main space, the Data Pavilion, 720 million pixels swimming in images inspired by the Yawanawá rainforest of the Amazon.
It is composed of 12 algorithmic chapters, each focusing on a different data subject to artistic examination, what Anadol calls “living imagery,” the invisible patterns of biomes—plants, fungi, trees and finally rain. Anadol tells the Observer: “People feel the wind of the thunderstorm. “We see mold on the floor, on the roof. We see the flowers appear as we smell them.”
The scent comes from L’Oreal’s Luxe division, just one of DATALAND’s participants, which provides olfactory data to accompany the visual image produced by the museum’s LNM (Large Nature Model), taken from the Smithsonian, Encyclopedia of Life, online archive from the American Museum of Natural History, Cornell London Lab as a Natural Museum collected by the Natural Museum and Anadol’s Museum. your team of scientists, architects, artists and engineers.
“AI research needs thousands of people,” he said. “We got amazing academics recording LiDAR 3D scans of the trees. We got people from the Amazon, an amazing sound engineer. For nine years, he recorded binaural recordings of forests across Amazonia. Then he said, ‘I can give my data’. So, we have this amazing relationship over the years that has allowed us to make a foundation.”
In addition, the Anadol team collects its data, from 16 rainforests so far, including sound recordings, pigs from the leaves, LiDAR scans and drone images, making everything open to the public at no cost.
No trip through DATALAND is the same as the system responds to data from viewers, sent via an electronic bracelet that measures heart rate and galvanic skin reactions that indicate emotional arousal while LiDAR sensors on the walls measure movement. So, while you are looking at a work of art, the work of art is looking at you.
A little interaction is the Infinity Room exhibit Machine Dreams: The Rainforestinspired by a dream Anadol had about a glass hummingbird. He was told by the Yawanawá chief that it is a special bird called Ruwi (glass) Pinu (musician), which only sings on its journey to take the last breath of the wisdom tree. It flies through the rainforest that opens up around you, crashing into a shiny tree before decompressing with an explosion. Sometimes you fly in a bird’s eye view where you discover the world of fungal networks and nerves.
“We don’t want to change the myth, but whenever the hummingbird smells and connects with the biome, the data channels, the memory channels hear the audience. The bird listens to the heartbeat of the audience in the room,” explains Anadol, noting the film producer Kathleen Kennedy (Jurassic Park, ET the Extra-Terrestrial) called it the future of cinema. “This story I let the audience feel when necessary. It’s a new way of telling a story. The audience becomes the show. The character can feel the emotions of the audience. We’re trying something that’s never been done before.”
Refik Anadol grew up in Istanbul, the son of teachers, and was attracted to computers at an early age—teaching them to program at the age of 8, just after watching a movie. Blade Runner and caught up in the question of what a machine can do with a person’s memory. He studied photography and videography before earning an MFA in visual communications at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, and later earned a second MFA in design media arts at UCLA.
His thesis work, Quadratureincluded is a monochromatic image displayed on the facade of the Santral Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art, with changing patterns that respond to sounds from the environment—architectures made to respond. The episode established him as one of Europe’s most interesting voices in digital art. In 2018, WDCH Dreams rendered the archives of the LA Philharmonic into an AI model and displayed the results on all the rotating panels of the concert hall, transforming the institution’s memory into a spectacle. A year later, Hallucination of the machine opened Artechouse’s Chelsea Market location in New York, training a similar AI-driven eye on the city’s built environment to produce a picture of the ever-changing urban landscape. Since then, Anadol’s work has appeared in museums, corporate and commercial centers around the world, and recently, A Living Buildingadorns the lobby of Norman Foster’s JPMorgan Chase Global Headquarters on Park Avenue.
Love Unsupervisedwhich appeared at MoMA around 2022-23 before becoming part of the permanent collection, A holy place it contains a wall of fluid motion that transforms into a mass of flowers that threaten to burst from their place and flood the space. It is (by Anadol’s standards) a common piece, fairly familiar to most viewers of his work. New York Times columnist Travis Diehl sarcastically likened it Unsupervised on screen, while New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz called it a giant lava lamp. But for all the detractors there are defenders like Los Angeles County Museum of Art chief curator Michael Govan, who compared Anadol to Marcel Duchamp, emphasizing the process behind the work of art.
Anadol remains undeterred by criticism. He explains: “If someone reduces it to a simple thing or a feeling, that person probably does not have the right knowledge, experience and wisdom of this new method. “When the process enters the game, which is very complex and requires new art, a new atelier, a new studio, a new Bottega, which requires new research.”
Machine Dreams: The Rainforest it ends with a single call of the last Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, a native Hawaiian bird that was recorded before it became extinct. It seems to echo the concerns many have about predictions that AI has a 2-20 percent chance of bringing about human extinction this century.
“I know it’s a tough ending, and I know it’s going to affect a person’s mind and soul.” However, art happens when it touches the mind and soul,” said Anadol, reflecting on the concerns. “It’s time to remind us that data is a form of memory, not just a number.”
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