The concept of a museum originated with cabinets of curiosities in the 16th century, rooms that contained everything from shrunken heads to narwhal tufts, 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, Basel Art Museum in Switzerland, dating from 1661, began with the Amerbach Cabinet, a private collection that included works by Hans Holbein the Younger.
But what if the art on display doesn’t fit in a frame or on a pedestal? What if it floats through the walls, floor and ceiling and is ever changing? What if his delivery system is a series of projectors and is as fleeting as a memory? Such questions may be asked by some visitors to the world’s first AI museum, DATALANDrecently opened in LA, the idea of Refik Anadolis generally considered the world’s first AI artist, or at least its most prominent.
DATALAND occupies a space designed by Frank Gehry on Grand Avenue, opposite the concert hall of the late great architect Walt Disney, and covers about 35,000 square meters, 10,000 of which houses the servers that generate the art. Upon entering, visitors descend an escalator into a massive space, the Data Pavilion, 720 million pixels swimming with images inspired by the Yawanawá rainforest of the Amazon.
Consisting of 12 algorithmic chapters, each one focuses on different data subjected to artistic experimentation, what Anadol calls “a living sculpture”, abstract models of biomes – flora, fungi, trees and finally rain. “People can feel the atmosphere of the storms. It’s like a super surreal teleportation,” Anadol tells the Observer. “We see fungal systems on the floor, on the ceiling. We see flowers appear as we smell.”
Scents come from L’Oreal’s Luxe division, just one of DATALAND’s contributors, providing olfactory data to complement the visual images created by the museum’s LNM (Large Nature Model), sourced from the Smithsonian, Encyclopedia of Life, an online repository from the Cornish American Museum of Natural History. 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 3D scans of trees on LiDAR. We found people from the Amazon, an amazing sound engineer. For nine years, he recorded binaural recordings of forests across the Amazon. And then he said, ‘I’m able to provide my data.’ So we have these incredible partnerships over the years that allowed us to create the foundation.”
In addition, Anadol’s team collects its own data, from 16 rainforests so far, including sound recordings, leaf pigments, LiDAR scans and drone footage, making it all open to the public at no cost.
No trip through DATALAND is the same as the system responds to viewer-sourced data transmitted by an electronic bracelet that measures heart rate and galvanic skin response that indicates emotional arousal while LiDAR sensors on the walls calibrate movement. So as you look at the artwork, the artwork looks at you.
Less interactive is the Infinity Room show Dreams Machine: Rainforestinspired by a dream Anadol had about a glass hummingbird. He was told by a Yawanawá chief that it was a special bird called the Ruwi (glass) Pinu (hummingbird), which alone sings on its journey to take its last breath of the tree of wisdom. Flying through a rainforest that unfolds all around you, he rams into the tree which glows before explosively dematerializing. At one point you fly into a bird’s eye view where you experience a world of mushroom and neural networks.
“We don’t want to change the mythology, but every time the hummingbird sniffs and connects to the biome, the data tunnels, the memory tunnels are sensing the audience. The bird is hearing the heartbeat of the audience in the room,” Anadol explains, noting the film’s producer. Kathleen Kennedy (Jurassic Park, ET Extraterrestrial) called it the future of cinema. “I let the audience feel this story when needed. It’s a new way to tell a story. The audience becomes a reflection. The character can feel the emotions of the audience. We’re experimenting with something that hasn’t been done before.”
Refik Anadol grew up in Istanbul, the son of teachers, and was drawn to computers early – teaching himself to program at the age of 8, not long after seeing the film. Blade Runner and being fascinated by the question of what a machine can do with human memory. He studied photography and video before earning an MFA in visual communication from Istanbul’s Bilgi University, later earning a second MFA in design media arts at UCLA.
His thesis work, Quadraturefeatured monochromatic images projected onto the facade of Istanbul’s Central Museum of Contemporary Art, with patterns that change in response to sounds from the surrounding neighborhood – architecture made responsive. The piece established him as one of Europe’s most exciting voices in digital art. in 2018, WDCH Dreams fed the archives of the LA Philharmonic into an AI model and projected the results across the concert hall’s curved panels, turning institutional memory into spectacle. A year later, The hallucination of the car opened ARTECHOUSE’s Chelsea Market space in New York, training the same AI-driven eye on the city’s built environment to produce a portrait of urban transformation in constant flux. Since then, Anadol’s work has been displayed in museums, corporate and commercial institutions around the world, with his latest, Residential buildingdecorating the lobby of Norman Foster’s JPMorgan Chase Global Headquarters on Park Avenue.
HOW Unsupervisedwhich was shown at MoMA for almost a year in 2022-23 before they become part of the permanent collection, Holy place features a fluidly moving wall that transforms into a mass of flowers that threaten to burst from its confines and flood the space. It is (by Anadol’s standards) a more conventional piece, familiar in form to most viewers of his work. New York Times Writer Travis Diehl mockingly compared Unsupervised in a screen saver while it is ticked New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz called it a giant lava lamp. But for every detractor there are defenders like the CEO of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Michael Govanwho compared Anadol to Marcel Duchampemphasizing the process behind the artwork.
Anadol remains undisturbed by the criticism. “If one distills it down to a simple object or a feeling, it is very likely that that person does not have the proper knowledge, experience and wisdom of this new medium,” he explains. “Once the process comes into play, which is extremely complex and requires a new craftsmanship, a new atelier, new studio, new Bottega, that requires a new search.”
Dreams Machine: Rainforest ends with the lone call of the last Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, a native Hawaiian bird that was recorded before it disappeared. 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 heavy ending and I know it will touch people’s minds and souls. And by the way, art happens when it touches minds and souls,” Anadol says, reflecting on existential concerns. “It’s a moment to remind us that data is a form of memory, not just a number.”
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