Dataland Los Angeles is the world’s first museum dedicated to AI arts, founded by media artist Refik Anadol. Anadol and partner Efsun Erkilic’s aim is not to replace ‘human art’ but instead to make machines express themselves through art we can feel. They ask the question; Can art feel us back? And, if so, what does it mean to be human in the age of machine intelligence – exploring the point where human imagination meets the creative potential of machines.
In order to realize their dream, the team gathered one of the world’s largest permission-based datasets of the natural world, partnering with the Smithsonian Institution, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Getty Conservation Institute, London’s Natural History Museum and its own surveys of 16 rainforests on earth. On the technology side, they partnered with Google Cloud to build an infrastructure to host its’ data. Other partners include the US semiconductor company NVIDIA, L’Oreal Luxe (crafting the experiential scent), design firm Gensler, ARUP (Dataland’s cinema-scale acoustics with a 250 speaker audio system), Valerie Confections, providing a taste experience with chocolates, and the RAS AI Foundation, also co-founded by Anadol and Erkilic, which oversees learning programs, and broader public engagement.
Occupying 25,000 square feet in the Grand LA, it was developed in conjunction with Frank Gehry. Dataland is an immersive entertainment complex that includes 84 4K projectors in one room alone, 3,500 square feet of LEDs, and a minimum of 1.5 billion pixels of image data. The museum features 5 multi-sensory galleries where visual, scents, and sounds are blended to offer a transformative experience.
Upon entering Dataland, visitors step into a black room with vertical stations set with tall screens. Each visitor scans their admission ticket, and are provided with a box containing wearables for the ‘journey’ – a bio-sensing wristband measuring heart rate, skin temperature, and galvanic skin response. Also provided are semi-circular devices which are scent diffusers placed around the neck (provided by L’Oreal Luxe) meant to mimic scents found in nature. The wristband’s measurements are fed into a central link that interprets physiological signals as various ‘emotions’. Various groups of visitors will experience unique artworks depending on their collective mood, reflecting back what they are ‘feeling’. Captured by the sensors as physiological arousal, this is the way our nervous systems are activated. Here and there the neck wearable device emits a subtle scent of rain, humid earth, or a sweet flower arises.
The first gallery encountered is the Data Pavillion, as you take an escalator down into a cavernous space – a long tall room with mirrored columns and ceilings refracting sweeping psychedelic nature imagery projected across the walls, floors and ceilings. Using Anadol’s Large Nature Model using over 500 million images from 16 rain forest environments, there’s also live ecological data streaming in from rain forests – all influenced by the biosignatures from visitors’ wristbands. There is a kaleidoscope of nature images of luminous constantly moving psychedelic-like colors and forms. Interactive and immersive, the space feels almost like a hallucination, with images re-imagining themselves from natural forms into fields of grid-like data.
In the Latent Gallery, there are three touchscreens where visitors can drag and click on nature imagery from the Large Nature Model, where a half billion images are stored. Seemingly a learning experience various types of plants and fauna can be brought up on the enormous screen to see and study – scanning through various data models, selecting the biome you want to explore.
In the Infinity Room, which is limited to only small groups at a time, the space feels like an LED cube with panels covering all the walls, ceiling and floor. The AI generated images take visitors on a journey deep into the Amazon rainforest where you follow a glass hummingbird and a ‘wisdom tree’ for an 8 minute film relying on tunnels, spirals and vortexes with scenes open to multi-colored rainforest transmutations along the way. This gallery experience is based upon one of Anadol’s trips to the Amazon rainforest where he met the native Yawanawa community who told Anadol of the hummingbird, a mythical figure called “Ruwe Pinu”. The orchestral music in combination with sacred healing songs of the Yawanawa are woven into the film.
The final gallery called The Sanctuary incorporates biometric data from the visitors themselves collected throughout the visit by the wristbands monitoring the heart rates, temperature, skin conductivity and emotional temperature. The data is processed and captured on to a white recessed frame-like structure on the giant wall looking like a sea of moving multicolored psychedelic brushstrokes swirling and folding into themselves.
Experiencing the several galleries of Dataland can sometimes feel disorienting, uncomfortable and an overload of sensorial imagery however when seen in the context of Anadol’s original question “Can art feel us back?” the answer appears to be “Yes”. If we look at art as an organic, forever changing and evolving entity that reflects both ways – us as humans to the art and using a ‘machine’ to reflect back to us what we see, can be a generative, life-giving force and an opportunity to experience art using all our senses – seeing, touching, smelling, hearing and tasting. Anadol calls this ‘living artworks’ and says “It’s all about being human in the age of machine intelligence.”
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