Installation view of “Machine Dreams: Rainforest” at Dataland.<\/p>\n
Refik Anadol Studio <\/p>\n
Refik Anadol <\/a>chose Los Angeles to build the \u201cworld\u2019s first Museum of AI Arts,\u201d as he terms it, for good reason. The Light and Space movement was born in the city, starting in the 1960s, when James Turrell masked windows in a shuttered Santa Monica hotel to control the light. Light and Space artists (Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler and others) had a singular goal: to reduce the field of vision to perception itself.<\/p>\n Sixty years later, Turkish-born Anadol is opening Dataland<\/a> in downtown Los Angeles, a 25,000-square-foot immersive entertainment complex that is designed to astonish. His new complex opens June 20 in the Frank Gehry-designed Grand complex, across the street from the Walt Disney Concert Hall, also designed by Gehry. All told, there are five galleries displaying visuals built from 1.5 billion pixels.<\/p>\n The immersive entertainment trend is known for drawing high traffic.<\/p>\n Refik Anadol Studio <\/p>\n Dataland is the high-end expression of the immersive entertainment trend, valued at $12.4 billion in 2025, according to a 2026 study by Intel Market Research<\/a>. At a recent preview, some questioned whether the AI-generated displays were actual art, or just \u201cdata that really looks cool,\u201d as one viewer commented. New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz famously called Anadol\u2019s 2022-2023 MoMA installation <\/a>\u201ca massive techno lava lamp\u201d and \u201ca half-million-dollar screensaver\u201d despite, or perhaps because of, its popularity.<\/p>\n At Dataland, visitors are first ushered into a black room with vertical stations set with tall screens\u2014reminiscent of entry into a spacecraft. Each guest scans an admission ticket, opening a box with wearables for the journey. A bio-sensing wristband measures heart rate, skin temperature, and galvanic skin response. Visitors also wear scent diffusers, which hang around the neck, provided by L\u2019Or\u00e9al Luxe.<\/p>\n The wristband\u2019s measurements are fed into a central link that interprets the physiological signals as various \u201cemotions.\u201d The Large Nature Model behind the visual displays uses those to create the displays. In short, different groups will see different artworks, all depending on their mood. What\u2019s actually being captured by the sensors is closer to physiological arousal, the ways the nervous system is activated.<\/p>\n First up is the Data Pavilion, a cavernous space powered by 84 4K projectors. Here, Anadol\u2019s Large Nature Model uses over 500 million images from 16 rainforest environments sourced through partnerships with London\u2019s Natural History Museum, the Smithsonian, Getty, iNaturalist and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. There\u2019s also live ecological data streaming in from rainforests\u2014all influenced by the biosignatures from a few dozen visitors wearing wristbands.<\/p>\n The room presents a trippy sight, much like a hallucination. \u201cThe machine is dreaming\u201d is how Anadol and his partner, Efsun Erkilic, term it. Enormous flowers unfurl and sail away into fractals. Light tunnels into new worlds, and flocks of birds, if they are indeed birds, dive and soar. At times, the scenes look realistic, but often quickly burst into fields of data, as if the machine has remembered that it is indeed not sentient.<\/p>\n Visitors’ data points, gathered from wristbands, are collectively displayed near the end of the visit.<\/p>\n R. Daniel Foster<\/p>\n Here and there, a scent of rain, humid earth, or a sweet flower arises\u2014emitted from the neck wearables. It\u2019s subtle and not overpowering.<\/p>\n The orchestral music, however, can seem overwrought, blasted through a 250-speaker audio system driven by L-ISA immersive sound from L-Acoustics. The sound hits you from everywhere. The feel of composer Kerim Karaoglu\u2019s score is grandly cinematic, somewhat saved by the sacred healing songs of the Yawanaw\u00e1 that are woven into the mix. These human voices from the Amazon feel ancient, providing genuinely moving moments.<\/p>\n One of the exhibits takes visitors on an ever-spiraling journey through a rainforest.<\/p>\n R. Daniel Foster<\/p>\n Moving on, the Latent Gallery has three LG touchscreens where visitors can generate nature imagery via the Large Nature Model. The results appear on screens as they\u2019re created.<\/p>\n From there, visitors enter the Infinity Room, which is restricted to a dozen people. The space is an LED cube with panels covering the four walls, the ceiling, and floor. The AI-generated visuals are a true ride\u2014you\u2019ll swear the room is tilting, but it\u2019s not. The journey travels deep into the Amazonian rainforest to encounter a glass hummingbird and a \u201cwisdom tree\u201d which resembles one that grows in the Amazon. The eight-minute filmic experience largely relies on spiraling, tunneling visuals common to recreations of acid trips. The scenes forever open onto new multi-hued rainforest mutations.<\/p>\n Another room displays a vertical projection set in a recessed frame\u2014not actual, it\u2019s a trick of the projected light. Digital waves undulate and swirl, garlands of flowers spiral outward\u2014it\u2019s all created from input from the bio-sensing wristbands, data that\u2019s also displayed in another room at the end of the journey. Exiting, visitors are handed a data chip that can be scanned to create a personalized scent or a T-shirt emblazoned with AI art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Installation view of “Machine Dreams: Rainforest” at Dataland. Refik Anadol Studio Refik Anadol chose Los Angeles to build…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353021,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[16813,144154,16815,144152,48,52,51,144156,144151,47,144155,50,49,144153,63546],"class_list":["post-353020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-ai-art","tag-art-in-los-angeles","tag-dataland","tag-jerry-saltz","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-large-nature-model","tag-light-and-space","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-artists","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-new-ai-artists","tag-refik-anadol"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353020\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}