A.I ART TAKES STAGE AT DATALAND

New media artist Refik Anadol has announced the creation of Dataland, the world’s first museum dedicated exclusively to artificial intelligence art. The groundbreaking museum is set to open in late 2025, situated in The Grand LA, a prominent Frank Gehry-designed development in downtown Los Angeles. An “intersection of human imagination and the creative potential of machines”, Dataland will be nestled among some of Los Angeles’s most prestigious institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Broad Museum. The museum’s location reflects Anadol’s “full-circle journey”, as it also stands directly across the Walt Disney Concert Hall where he projected an algorithmic video to celebrate the LA Philharmonic’s centennial in 2018. Using large scale projectors, the nightly live performances featured machine dreams of the philharmonic’s 100 years of digitized memories, mapped directly onto the undulating stainless-steel exterior of the iconic building.

“Los Angeles is the perfect city to launch Dataland, a forward-thinking, revolutionary museum in support of the fields to which I have dedicated my career: art, science, technology and A.I research,” said Anadol, 38. “To have a permanent space for us to develop a new paradigm of what a museum can be, by fusing human imagination with machine intelligence and the most advanced technologies available, is a realization of one of my biggest dreams.”

The fusion of futuristic themes is not new for Refik Anadol Studio. The Los Angeles office co-founded by Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç has long been dedicated to the integration of technology in visual storytelling. Their careers have been marked by the innovative use of A.I in art, with previous projects displayed at prestigious venues like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Serpentine and, most recently, the United Nations headquarters. Last year, the MoMA acquired Anadol’s Unsupervised, a massive digital canvas powered by A.I to continuously create evolving displays drawn from 200 years of imagery in the museum’s collection. His ability to merge art with technology has earned him global recognition and paved the way for Dataland’s vision.

Beyond showcasing A.I generated art, the venture will also serve as a hub for responsible innovation, backed by the RAS A.I Foundation, a nonprofit branch of the organization founded in 2023. The museum will showcase “ethically collected” datasets, like Anadol’s Large Nature Model, an open-source generative A.I tool created using data contributed by the Smithsonian, the UK’s Natural History Museum and other leading institutions. It will integrate online access and educational platforms while serving as a public repository for extensive, nature-focused datasets. As the first museum of its kind, Dataland prepares to become a pioneering force in the art world and redefine what a museum can be in the digital age.

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