In the heart of Downtown L.A.’s cultural axis, Dataland has opened — according to its own description, the world’s first museum for AI art. There, Refik Anadol Studio is undertaking a fascinating experiment: with the help of the Large Nature Model, the spirit of the machine meets the thinking of nature.
Lianas and lines, some traced into the soft ground by ant colonies. Light filtering through the many-layered canopy of the Amazon. Humidity modulating scents, and an acoustic backdrop that sounds different at midday than it does in the sultry night. When Refik Anadol, superstar of immersive media art, travelled to Aldeia Sagrada and Nova Esperança to collaborate with the Indigenous Yawanawá in the Brazilian Amazon, he drew from abundance. The initiative was called “Possible Futures”, and within its framework his art project “Winds of Yawanawá” was created. AI, Indigenous knowledge and the spiritual dimension of the rainforest were transformed into data paintings; real-time weather data as well as shifting wind directions and intensities flowed into the video installation.
A little later, the Istanbul-born artist, who founded Refik Anadol Studio in L.A. together with Efsun Erkılıç in 2014, went one step further. The team developed the Large Nature Model, LNM, a special approach to training artificial intelligence. Unlike common language models, which primarily work with human texts, it is based on extensive nature datasets provided with consent. How can the “thinking” of ecosystems be visualised? The LNM creates the foundation for this and was shown, among other places, in the installation “Living Archive: Nature” at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
This connection between art, technology and research also shapes Dataland, which opened on 20 June 2026. Los Angeles, always open to radical experiments, seems the perfect biotope for it. Immersive art now has a prominent home here — in immediate proximity to institutions such as The Broad, MOCA, The Music Center and REDCAT. The architectural framework was created by Frank Gehry, the Pritzker Prize laureate who died in 2025: Dataland is located in The Grand LA, the complex he designed. Five galleries are spread across around 2,322 square metres; the museum spaces were developed together with Gensler and Arup. The already launched AI Artist Residency Program with Google Arts & Culture is also intended to deepen creative applications of artificial intelligence. “Machine Dreams: Rainforest” is the museum’s first presentation, and it fits spectacularly into the work of Refik Anadol Studio. Anadol explores the aesthetics of data streams and machine learning, transforming algorithmic information into immersive media art. Projects in more than seventy cities on six continents have one thing in common: they are always concerned with the creative potential at the interface between human and machine.
The Large Nature Model describes a particular facet of this work, in which vast quantities of data become artistic raw material. In “Machine Hallucination”, the studio transformed New York’s digital image memory into a new vision of the metropolis. For “Quantum Memories”, around 200 million images of the Earth, the oceans and the atmosphere merged into an alternative reality of nature. Anadol and his team, in a sense, paint with a “thinking” brush: data becomes material, neural networks become partners. Their site-specific AI data sculptures respond to architecture and history, making weather data, archives and other invisible streams of information visually tangible.
In Dataland, this principle expands to include sound, movement, scent and audience responses. Wearables anonymously capture signals such as heartbeat, movement and position; together with current environmental data, they influence images, sounds and atmospheres. Molecular scent compositions accompany the play of unpredictable forms and colours. The museum thus sees itself not as a place of finished works, but as a living system in which art is continuously created anew. The trip through the Amazon presents the forest as what it also is: a vast, interconnected form of intelligence. Light, humidity and time generate a constant stream of new materialisations. The colourful proliferation also marks the starting point of a question that runs through Anadol’s work: What happens when machines learn the language of nature? And can AI be trained in such a way that it not only retrieves the digital memory of the Earth, but perhaps even develops a form of empathy?
Salvator ex machina? A rescue of the world whose roots grow better with the help of AI? Dataland offers no simple answer. What opens up before visitors’ eyes, surges, foams, grows and collapses three-dimensionally in on itself feels like a world machine — and at the same time like a wild garden. At times, it also leads into a past that evokes sadness. In the Infinity Room, the recording of the last male Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, an extinct bird from Hawaii, can be heard. Its unanswered call becomes an acoustic document of ecological loss. Yet “Machine Dreams: Rainforest” is not merely a lament. Between data, memories and hallucinations, a hint of the future also emerges.
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