Los Angeles | Refik Anadol is considered one of the most renowned digital data artists of our time. His AI-generated digital artworks can be experienced in museums, shopping malls, and corporate lobbies alike. Now, the Turkish-born artist has built his own museum, Dataland, in Los Angeles. invidis was there for the opening and met the artist.
Refik Anadol: A Living Artwork – Inside Dataland LA
Digital art experiences abound worldwide – in churches, caves, and industrial buildings. Old masters are digitally projected in darkened rooms – a welcome approach to presenting fine art to a wider audience. But Refik Anadol and co-founder Efsun Erkılıç, along with their team of 20, have created something entirely different with Dataland. Here, existing art isn’t presented; visitors aren’t merely spectators but creators in a multisensory, live artwork that is continuously evolving and never truly finished.
Dataland leverages cutting-edge AI power – on par with state-of-the-art AI data centers. In the basement of the museum—located in the Frank Gehry Museum District of Downtown Los Angeles – are servers with 130 Nvidia Blackwell chips. The edge computing data center alone has a market value of $5 million. Through its partner Google, the team also has access to Google AI resources in the cloud.
The tech behind Dataland
Dataland visitors receive a fitness tracker wristband that anonymously tracks their entire journey and emotions, using lidar sensors to capture movements within the spaces that influence the data artworks. Rafik would disagree – visitors don’t influence the artworks but rather continuously add new data points to the data story through human interaction. Dataland, the world’s first Museum of AI Arts and digital ecosystem, was developed to this end, where human imagination meets the creative potential of machines.
Upon entering, visitors wait in the lobby in front of a floor-to-ceiling MicroLED wall – which, like all the museum’s LED screens, was designed by Absen – and are introduced to the live art concept: “This is not a display, nothing here resets to zero, every visitor leaves a memory, and every memory changes Dataland forever.” The museum stretches across five multi-sensory galleries – all equipped with the latest and greatest in digital signage technology. Floor to ceiling LEDs, LED cube with content so powerful it takes away the feeling for space, room and time and a fully immersive projection space. The art is so powerful, immersive and interactive triggering all kinds of emotions. People started dancing, conducting and interacting with AI-Art build on Dataland’s own AI-model, trained with 1.2bn ecological data points, more than 500m images plus continuous live data.
LG OLED screens inform and explain visitors about the experiences and show live data, positioning, visitor flows, emotional temperature and last but not least live insights into the AI model. For tech-nerds the fascination doesn’t stop with digital art, OLED screens across the rooms display live AI Data, current Google Gemini prompts, the raw AI output as well as AI prompt engineering.
Where digital signage meets storytelling
The team is proud to have developed their own frontline model, optimized for Dataland’s first exhibition “Machine Dreams: Rainforest”. The first exhibition focuses on nature – as a counterpoint to the typically rather cold AI technology. Visitors receive a fitness tracker and scent necklace at the entrance for a personal and subconsciously emotional experience. Together with lidar sensors, movements and interactions within the museum are anonymously tracked – visitors receive their personal visitor token at the exit.
The largest room in the exhibition immediately demonstrates what the 150 computers are capable of calculating live. Eighty-four synchronized Epson projectors generate over 700 square meters of pixels across the entire space – six times more than The Sphere in Las Vegas. And all this in a space ten times smaller. Surrounded by a 200-channel spatial soundscape in cooperation with L-Acoustics.
In other rooms, visitors can interact with AI models on wall-sized LEDs via transparent OLED displays. Here, the visitor is in control – the interaction allows them to journey through the 500 square meters of nature images used to train the models. Or take nature into your own hands to design new plants with AI.
LED cube as highlight
The LED cube makes the biggest impression – a fast-paced storytelling experience that at times feels like a roller coaster ride where space and time seem to slip away beneath your feet. The sound and movements in the floor are rapid, followed in quick succession by a highly emotional journey through the rainforest, a plant that blooms for only one day, and an extinct bird species. AI makes almost anything possible, and yet our planet is severely threatened.
Rafik Anadol is proud of the sustainable operating concept – essentially green signage in its most extreme form. The CO2 footprint per visitor is as small as a mobile phone charge. Green energyy is used throughout the museum.
Dataland is more than an immersive experience with a fixed narrative and is not simply a projection room – rather, the visitor becomes part of a whole and yet experiences it in a very individual way. One-to-many becomes one-to-one. A personal journey that you take with you at the end (token). The story is never finished – every visitor develops it further.
Dataland turns visitors into creators
In addition to sound and sights, there is also scent – unconsciously and always surprisingly. A Scent Dimension was developed in collaboration with L’Oréal – which individually releases unique compositions from eight molecular scents.
Dataland does something to you – everyone experiences their own personal journey. The visitor is part of the story – a passive observer role is not intended. Four rooms – four different experiences. With all senses – to the limits.
None of the integrated technologies are truly new – projection, LEDs, transparent displays, actuators in the floor, lidar sensors, health trackers, and of course, sound – but in combination, they are uniquely new and absolutely moving.
Must-go for digital signage enthusiasts
For anyone with even a passing interest in digital signage, digital storytelling, and AI – Dataland is a must-visit. For everyone else, it’s simply sensational entertainment that not only amuses but also educates. A truly formative experience that begs to be repeated.
The initial limitations at the opening, the fact that not all processes were fully operational and the visitor flow couldn’t handle the crowds, were easily forgiven. The two masterminds behind Dataland were on hand, explaining the experiences and technologies and taking time for visitors. Not just for VIPs and press – but as a genuine passion project. Extremely friendly.
