The museum concept originated with 16th-century curio cabinets, rooms containing anything from shrunken heads to centipede tusks, reflecting the interests of their owners. When the collections overflowed into other rooms, they were referred to as galleries, and a series of galleries, a museum. The world’s first public art museum, the Art Museum Basel in Switzerland, dates back to 1661, and originated with the Amerbach Cabinet, a private collection that included works by Hans Holbein the Younger.
But what if the displayed art doesn’t fit in the frame or base? What if it was swimming through the walls, floors and ceiling, constantly changing? What if its delivery system is a series of display devices, as ephemeral as memory? Some visitors to the world’s first AI museum, DATALAND, the recently opened Los Angeles brainchild of Rafik Anadol, generally considered the world’s first AI artist, or at least its most prominent artist, may ask such questions.
DATALAND occupies a Frank Gehry-designed space on Grand Avenue, across the street from the late master architect’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, and covers about 35,000 square feet, 10,000 of which houses servers that generate the art. Upon entering, visitors descend an escalator into a massive space, the Data Pavilion, which contains 720 million pixels with images inspired by the Yawanawa rainforest in the Amazon.
Comprised of 12 algorithmic chapters, each chapter focuses on different data subjected to artistic experimentation, what Anatolia calls “living sculpture,” abstract patterns of biomes—plants, fungi, trees, and finally rain. “People can feel the atmosphere of thunderstorms. It’s like a very surreal teleportation,” Anadolu tells the Observer. “We see fungal systems on the floor, on the ceiling. We see flowers appear when we smell them.”
The scents come from L’Oreal’s Luxe division, a DATALAND contributor, providing olfactory data to complement the museum’s LNM (Large Nature Model) visual images, sourced from the Smithsonian, Encyclopedia of Life, an online repository from the American Museum of Natural History, the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, and the Natural History Museum in London, as well as data collected by Anadol’s own team of scientists, architects, artists and engineers.
“AI research requires thousands of people,” he says. “We found amazing academics recording LiDAR 3D scans of trees. We found people from the Amazon, who is an amazing audio engineer. For nine years, he made binaural recordings of forests across the Amazon. Then he said, ‘I’m able to provide my data.’ So, we’ve had these amazing partnerships over the years that have allowed us to create the foundation.”
In addition, the Anatolia team is collecting its own data, from 16 rainforests so far, including audio recordings, pigments from leaves, LiDAR scans and drone footage, making it all open to the public at no cost.
No journey through DATALAND is the same as the system responds to data from viewers, relayed by an electronic bracelet that measures heart rate and galvanic skin response indicating emotional arousal while LiDAR sensors on the walls calibrate movement. So, while you watch the artwork, the artwork is watching you.
Less interactive is the Infinity Room view Machine Dreams: Rainforestinspired by a dream Anatolia had about a glass hummingbird. The Yawanawa chief told him that this was a special bird called the rui (glass) benu (hummingbird), which only sings on its flight to take the last breath from the tree of wisdom. You fly through the rainforest that unfolds around you, landing on a tree that shimmers before exploding explosively. At some point, you fly into a bird’s eye view where you experience a world of fungal and neural networks.
“We don’t want to change myths, but when a hummingbird smells and calls the biome, the data tunnels, the memory tunnels sense the audience. The bird listens to the heartbeat of the audience in the room,” Anadolu explains, referring to film producer Kathleen Kennedy.Jurassic Park, ET extraterrestrialHe called it the future of cinema. “I let the audience feel this story when it’s necessary. It’s a new way of telling a story. The audience becomes a reflection. The character can feel the audience’s emotions. We’re trying something that’s never been done before.”
Rafik Anadolu grew up in Istanbul, the son of teachers, and was drawn to computers early – teaching himself programming at the age of eight, shortly after seeing the film. Blade Runner He became fascinated by the question of what a machine could do with human memory. He studied photography and videography before earning a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Communication from Bilgi University in Istanbul, and later earned a second Master of Arts in Media Design from UCLA.
His thesis works, Squaredfeatured monochromatic images displayed on the façade of the Santral Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art, with patterns changing in response to sounds coming from the surrounding neighbourhood, making the architecture responsive. This piece established him as one of the most exciting voices in digital art in Europe. In 2018, WDCH Dreams He fed the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s archives into an AI model and projected the results across the concert hall’s curved panels, transforming institutional memory into spectacle. A year later, Automatic hallucinations ARTECHOUSE’s Chelsea Market space has opened in New York, training the same AI-driven eye on the city’s built environment to produce an image of urban transformation in constant flow. Since then, Anadol’s work has appeared in museums, companies and commercial institutions around the world, with his most recent works, Living buildingdecorating the lobby of Norman Foster’s JPMorgan Chase global headquarters on Park Avenue.
He loves Unsupervisedwhich appeared at MoMA for about a year in 2022-23 before becoming part of the permanent collection, haven It has a wall of fluid movement that turns into an undulating mass of flowers that threatens to burst from its confines and flood the space. It is (by Anatolian standards) a more traditional piece, familiar in form to most viewers of his work. New York Times writer Travis Diehl likened it to sarcasm Unsupervised to the screensaver, while famous New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz described it as a giant lava lamp. But for every critic there are defenders like Michael Govan, CEO of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who compared Anadol to Marcel Duchamp, emphasizing the process behind the artwork.
Anatolia remains unfazed by the criticism. “If someone distills it down to a simple thing or feeling, that person likely doesn’t have the right knowledge, experience and wisdom for this new medium,” he explains. “Once the process comes into play, which is a very complex process that requires a new craftsmanship, a new operator, a new studio, a new bottega, it requires new research.”
Machine Dreams: Rainforest It ends with the single call of the last Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, a native Hawaiian bird that was recorded before it became extinct. This appears to reflect the concerns of many about predictions that AI has a 2 to 20 percent chance of causing human extinction this century.
“I know it’s a heavy ending, and I know it will touch people’s minds and souls. And by the way, art happens when it touches the mind and soul,” Anadolu says, thinking about existential concerns. “It is a moment to remind us that data is a form of memory, not just a number.”
More in New Media and Digital Art Culture