Refik Anadol Opens World's First AI Art Museum With Rainforest Dreams in Downtown LA

Refik Anadol, The Art World's Happy Warrior for A.I.

"All right!" Refik Anadol said, as the escalator carried us downward. "We are entering the dream of the machine." We had arrived in the cavernous first gallery of Dataland, the twenty-five-thousand-square-foot space, in downtown Los Angeles, that Anadol calls the first museum of A.I. art. Space-age music blared night-club-loud as pictures of birds, plants, and flowers cascaded down the walls. This array was a small sample of the half-billion images -- and the hundred thousand hours of audio, including birdsong, rain, and even silence -- on which Anadol has trained the Large Nature Model, an A.I. model that powers "Machine Dreams: Rainforest," Dataland's inaugural show. The pictures swooped around and beneath us like a cloud of starlings, and an earthy, slightly metallic smell emanated from the diffusers we wore around our necks, which, along with a biometric wristband, each Dataland visitor receives upon arrival. The aroma is one of twelve scents -- formulated by the L.N.M., with a little help from L'Oréal Luxe -- that perfume visitors' trips through the museum's five rooms. Anadol calls it "the scent of data." Data is Anadol's alpha and omega, his medium and his muse. He often works with large archives, or, as with the L.N.M., scientific data gathered by organizations such as the Smithsonian Institution and London's Natural History Museum, and by his own researchers in rain forests across the world. "Visualization" is too humble a word for the operations that Anadol performs, though in recent years his work has been unusually visible. His art has lit up the Sphere, in Las Vegas; the stage of the Grammy Awards, in L.A.; and the halls of the World Economic Forum at Davos and the United Nations in New York. He has done "collaborations" -- the industry euphemism for upscale advertisements -- with Bulgari, Dior, and Hennessy. He has permanent installations in Boston's Logan Airport, and in JPMorgan Chase's gargantuan new headquarters in midtown Manhattan. And in 2022, amidst a blowout year-long show, his "Unsupervised: Machine Hallucinations" became the first generative-A.I. art work -- and one of the first linked to non-fungible tokens -- to enter the MOMA collection, and with it the canon of contemporary art. MOMA felt very far away as the images around us gave way to a "Matrix"-like environment of grids strobing to a driving beat. Anadol was describing how measurements from various rain forests were informing what I was seeing, but I was struggling to absorb our surroundings. "It's overwhelming," I told Anadol. "The room is seven hundred and twenty million pixels," he replied, by way of explanation. The sensory overload, he added, was meant to evoke "the sublime power of being connected to incredibly vast data sets," which Anadol views as the "new language of humanity."

AI museum brings sights, sounds and smells of the rainforest

Los Angeles (United States) (AFP) - The squawks of macaws, the smell of wet earth after rain and a swirl of colors will transport visitors from a Los Angeles museum to the heart of the Amazon rainforest -- or rather, an AI version of it. Data collected from those visitors -- their movements, their heartbeats and even the temperature of their skin -- will feed the computer that is creating the immersive display, using a network of sensors, including those on the wrists of ticket-holders. "Machine Dreams: Rainforest" is the inaugural exhibition at Dataland, a new museum in the heart of America's second biggest city that is the brainchild of Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkilic, whose 10 million lines of code power the animations -- using 1.5 billion pixels. Anadol said he was inspired by a visit to the Brazilian Amazon, a place he thinks everyone should experience. "But I do not believe we should all go to the rainforest," he told AFP. "The question was: can the rainforest come to us? Can we still connect, feel special, respect and love nature, learn about it?" Wall-mounted sensors will track visitors' movements, and guests will wear a medical-grade, watch-like device to monitor their emotions and heart rate for interacting with the model. They will also carry a portable scent diffuser throughout the experience. Using billions of images and datapoints, the model will create a constantly evolving experience. It is as if the system were "dreaming," Erkilic explained. "It's moving all the time, because it's gathering data. As soon as it builds one structure, it also affects the overall storytelling," he said. "It's coming from a more poetic place instead of a scientific place. The machine itself is trying to recreate the reality based on the data points, it's like bringing all the little bits and dots and trying to build the reality itself." At the end of the experience, visitors can sample chocolates with flavors generated by the model, or print T-shirts and paintings resulting from their interaction. These are intended to serve as tangible souvenirs of the ephemeral dream in Dataland. "The system forgets you; that is the beauty of it," says Anadol. Dataland opens to the public on June 20.

What's actually in the world's first AI art museum?

Dataland aims to challenge what you think you know about AI art. I have to admit to being a bit dubious when it was revealed two years ago that the world's first AI art museum would open beside The Broad and the Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art. Dataland was announced at a time when the term 'AI art' was more commonly used to refer to Midjourney maulings of Greg Rutkowski's fantasy art style. But the history of AI art began long before the era of AI slop. Since the dawn of the computer age, artists have explored the use of data and algorithms to create art. Dataland combines that experimental spirit with the contemporary furor for immersive experiences. Its inaugural exhibition opened last week, and suffice it to say, there isn't a Ghiblified meme or a video of Will Smith eating spaghetti in sight. So what on Earth's in it? Founded by the digital artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, Dataland spans five galleries covering some 25,000 square feet. Its first exhibition, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, is presented as an immersive exploration of living artworks that explore one of the planet's most complex and vital ecosystems. Interconnected environments are created in real-time by the Refik Anadol Studio's Large Nature Model, an AI system that the studio says was trained on an ethically curated ecological archive that combines data from leading research institutions and environmental organisations with original datasets gathered through fieldwork and direct observation of nature. The exhibition seeks to transform this hard rainforest intelligence into living environments through image, sound, scent and interaction. Visitors can choose to connect themselves to the museum through two wearable devices: a wrist-worn medical-grade biosensor that takes real-time measurements of heart rates and skin temperature and conductivity, and a device worn around the neck that delivers an individualised scent journey for each visitor. The idea is that this plugging in to the exhibition creates a living dialogue between art and the viewer that's facilitated by a machine but unique to each visitor. One of the galleries is called the Data Pavilion. Vast visuals unfold across across eighty-four synchronised high-resolution projectors that transform walls and ceilings into a shifting canvas, enveloped by a two-hundred-channel spatial soundscape composed live from rainforest data. The tracking systems allow each visitor's presence to influence the evolving sensory landscape. Heartbeat data is transformed into sonic patterns that vary according to spatial position and movement. Eight molecular scent compositions, developed with L'Oréal Luxe, release in sequence as the work unfolds, from the the scent of tropical fruit to damp of fungus on the forest floor and "the musk of unseen fauna" The exhibition also involves an element of active participation. The Latent Gallery allows visitors to explore data archives, discover hidden patterns and perform their own experiments and data paintings at interactive stations. The're also a culinary programme that uses ecological data on a species' habitat, climate and chemistry and translates it into flavour profiles that are then used in the kitchen as infusions and tasting elements. "The data becomes edible," the museum says. A third gallery called the Infinity Room hosts a piece called the The Dream of Ruwe Pinu, which was apparently inspired by a dream that Refik had interpreted by a Yawanawá spiritual leader on a trip to the Amazon. Finally Gallery D, The Sanctuary, was conceived as a more contemplative environment where the accumulated record of data captured from visitors' wearable devices - the studio describes this as "collective emotional temperature" - is woven into a thirty-foot data painting. The artwork also produces the molecular signature of the Amazonian moonflower, a rare blossom that opens for a single night each year. With an exhibit that involves AI and themes of nature, there's an inevitable discord around the environmental impact of artificial intelligence. Google says its cloud infrastructure, on which the Large Nature Model runs is powered by 87% carbon-free renewable compute, but it's hard to avoid the tension with the controversies around the impact of AI data centres. There are also many people who will argue that no form of AI art can truly be art, and that the person who creates it is an 'AI user' not an 'AI artist'. I'd argue that it's hard to deny that, beyond the technology, Dataland is generating the kind of experience that people have had for millennia at places of worship and later museums, sharing silent moments of contemplation and wonder with strangers. I'd say that this makes what inside a form of art. It's Instagrammable art as entertainment, but this immersive experience is deeper and more thought-provoking than projections of moving Van Gogh paintings on a wall, and it raises interesting questions about how our concept of art and of museums could evolve. This museum has a brain, of sorts, which processes and responds to data in real time, both from within its own walls and from places many miles away, all melding it all in real time. It changes the concept of a museum from a vessel for hosting the artistic experience to something we plug into to feed and feed from. "For 5000 years humans have been emotionally moved by artworks, but the relationship has always flowed in one direction," Anadol has said. "While developing Dataland we asked ourselves, 'Is it possible for artworks to feel us back?'" Dataland is located at Frank Gehry's The Grand LA at 100 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles. Machine Dreams: Rainforest, runs until Jan 31, 2027. In July, the museum intends to announce details of its first artist residency program, developed with Google Arts & Culture to support creatives working with machine intelligence, Tickets can be booked online through the website.

Exclusive | World's first AI museum is vibrant sensory overload -- but is it really 'art'?

Everything is moving so fast in the rainforest, with life pulsing all around: in front, above, and below your feet. The 360-degree cube takes the eye on a deep dive into exotic flora and fauna. Then comes an even deeper dive into the inner workings of trees, the sap pulsing through a usually invisible network. The vibrant, ever-moving images inside the windowless cube are created by 1.2 billion data prompts live-fed from 16 rainforests across the globe. The ever-moving, gigantic images are accompanied by music -- vast and engulfing -- and smells, from floral to mossy to even electrical. This is the wildly immersive Data Pavilion inside Dataland, billed as the world's first Museum of AI Arts, opening in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, June 20, inside The Grand LA complex. Dataland debuts with "Machine Dreams: Rainforest," a visceral, blow-your-mind immersion that goes far beyond data -- certainly an art museum experience, but unlike few others. The sensory splash, co-founded by artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, showcases four more reality-bending galleries to explore -- like the classic "Alice in Wonderland" meets "Avatar" or the trippy, new horror film "Backrooms." Erkılıç watches, tears gathering on her cheeks, while recently venturing through Anadol's Infinity Room, which zooms the eye and mind on a journey deep into the rainforest, a digital Shangri-La that displays the beauty of nature, as well as its fragilities. It's far from a flat tech experience. This is machine-created art with heart: an emotionally moving experience that feels alive and, in fact, intelligent. But as you observe the art spread across the 25,000-square-foot "living museum" -- an additional whopping 10,000 square feet of space houses the museum's considerable tech -- the art-slash-machine is observing and interacting with visitors via an optional wearable sensory wrist device issued at admission that captures intimate details like body heat and heart rate. A separate scent-emitting device also releases odors along the way. To create art splashed across a giant wall-to-wall screen, mirrored on a reflective ceiling and floor, the machine reacts to data transmitted in real time from the dozen-plus rainforests. "We're getting the data out of the tree," Anadol told The Post, beaming. Even he seemed amazed. "We're getting the humidity of the soil and the tree's electromagnetic signals they send to each other," he added. "It's very complex." The stunning spectacle allows the viewer to "know about the trees and how they communicate with one another," added Erkılıç. Algorithms as art Dataland emerges amid the controversies of AI-generated art, from writing to singing, especially its encroachment on copyright and personal rights. "I've been a defender of artists' copyright infringement for a long time as it relates to artists I've represented," Jenn Singer, founder of Manhattan's Jenn Singer Gallery, told The Post. "It was something that got me thinking about the ethical implications." After all, the data has to come from somewhere or someone. It's an issue about which Anadol is acutely aware. The world-renowned artist has been doing this for years, and, handled correctly, he thinks it's time for algorithms to have a seat at the art table. He is "ethically" accessing data compiled by Google, tech company Nvidia, and the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, in reciprocal partnerships. "The model is open source. It's free to the public," explained Anadol, "meaning that even the institutions who shared the data with us, they can use that for their own purposes." Singer has nothing but praise for Anadol's work. "What's interesting about Dataland and Refik's work specifically is he's gathering his data from natural sources -- so, from nature," she said. "He's really mindful of the source and not infringing on copyrights." Veteran gallery founder Jeffrey Deitch, who showed Anadol's Living Paintings exhibit in 2023, isn't worried about AI in the arts. "It is a tool that artists can use. And just because something is done with AI doesn't mean it's interesting. I've seen some terrible work made with AI," he told The Post. What about the inevitable deluge of AI art "slop"? "There will be AI art slop," lamented Singer. "Lots of slop." But is it really 'art'? At its root, though, remains a question: Is it even art? The answer lies in part with the viewer; not everyone connects with the Mona Lisa, after all. But another big question also comes to mind: Who actually is the artist -- the machine or the human? "Refik created the concept; he is the artist," Deitch declared. Undoubtedly, Anadol's art is very moving in the way it connects the viewer to his chosen subject, nature. It goes beyond constantly moving and evolving, color-saturated images to illustrate the disappearance of flora and fauna species by the hundreds each year. "I appreciate the concern with environmental issues and social issues. That gives much more depth to the work," said Deitch. "We showed the work about the disappearing coral reefs, and the work raises awareness about these important issues." With that in mind, Erkılıç said it would be a dream to have famed naturalist David Attenborough, who recently turned 100, in the galleries and see the reaction of the machine. "It would be so incredible," she said. Flex it through the gift shop Of course, painting with data is a touchy subject. Look no further than institutions like LA's Hammer Museum and London's Serpentine Galleries, which have exhibited Anadol's work, as well as The Broad and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: they all declined or did not respond to interview requests from The Post. Perhaps shadows still exist from the sudden rise and staggeringly quick crash of the early 2020s NFT art trend, which brings to mind how to actually sell video and moving art, too. Then how will this AI museum, packed with very expensive machines and systems, make money? Ticket sales are one way: Dataland, open Tuesday through Sunday, offers standard access tickets (from $49 to $79), priority access ($89 to $129), and annual memberships ($350 to $1,500). "We also have the shop," added Anadol with a mischievous smile. And it's no ordinary gift shop, of course: there are T-shirts, but they are individually designed using a visitor's personal data detected by one's wrist sensor. That data can even be used to create a custom scent, bottled on the spot. Then there's Qualia, a rather sweet, contemplative robotic arm that will turn your data into physical art and paint "your portrait." Well, a portrait of your heart rate, at least.