A New Experiential Gallery Just Might Change Your Mind About AI Art

“I think we are literally in a renaissance,” says the artist Refik Anadol, in a characteristically optimistic comment, when asked how he sees this moment in art history, with artificial intelligence ascendant yet controversial as a medium. “We just don’t have a name for it yet.”

Anadol, known for technological installations that probe the relationship between humans and machines, has reason to be happy. On June 20, Dataland, the cutting-edge downtown Los Angeles gallery he cofounded with studio partner Efsun Erkılıç, opened its doors to an eager public. Billed as the first “museum of AI arts” in the world, it welcomed more than 10,000 visitors to the opening exhibit in the first two weeks, Anadol tells WIRED.

Courtesy of Dataland

The set piece is his most ambitious to date, an immersive architectural vision titled Machine Dreams: Rainforest. Its interactive digital displays, directly responding to the visitors’ movements and biometric data (tracked by wearable devices), produce ever-shifting images and soundscapes drawn from Anadol’s Large Nature Model, an AI system built using natural science archives from prestigious research institutions like the Smithsonian.

“For three years, we started from scratch and trained our own AI models, and we worked with our own data sets,” Anadol says. He and his team traveled to the Amazon and other rainforests to capture raw material that would fuel the model’s hallucinated versions of those environments. “We have 5 petabytes worth of raw data that we collected by ourselves,” Anadol says. He’s proud that Dataland made a point of sourcing this trove with the consent and participation of researchers, whereas Silicon Valley’s major AI firms have faced backlash and lawsuits over what many creators say is unlicensed, extractive use of their content as training data.

Anadol adds that Google DeepMind gave Dataland access to “experimental low-energy” resources, allowing the gallery to run on Google Cloud and maintain “sustainable compute.” (Anadol has collaborated with the tech giant since becoming the first person awarded the Google Artists and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency in 2016.)

Ethics, environmental responsibility, and a wholehearted effort to produce what feels like a living, breathing ecosystem with artificial intelligence: These commitments are crucial if Anadol and Dataland want to redefine “AI art.” The very phrase is a nonstarter for many creatives and critics of the generative “slop” that has infested visual media at every level. Anadol is perfectly aware of people rejecting that stuff, and he hardly blames them. “I mean, 100 percent, the majority is right,” he says, noting that when someone hears about AI art, “their first assumption is like, prompt engineering, or a bunch of eight-second clips.”