LAGOS, Nigeria (VOICE OF NAIJA) – DATALAND, the world’s first museum dedicated entirely to artificial intelligence art, opened its doors to the public today, Friday June 20, in downtown Los Angeles, marking a milestone in the history of both technology and cultural institutions.
Co-founded by Turkish-American digital artist Refik Anadol and artist and producer Efsun Erkiliç, DATALAND occupies 25,000 square feet within The Grand LA, a mixed-use complex designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry, situated directly across from the Walt Disney Concert Hall, according to Artnet News.
The museum’s inaugural exhibition, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, immerses visitors in an audiovisual world built from millions of images and sounds drawn from nature datasets compiled in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution and Getty, among other institutions.
According to NPR, the exhibition was described by the museum as “a narrative of a deepening relationship between machine intelligence and the natural world,” inspired by a visit Anadol and Erkiliç made to the Amazon rainforest, where the artist met with Indigenous community leaders.
According to The Art Newspaper, Anadol framed the museum’s purpose as a direct challenge to the centuries-long relationship between art and its audience. “For 5,000 years, we looked at artworks and we felt something,” he told The Art Newspaper.
“Now, my challenge question is: ‘Can the artwork feel us back?'” To that end, visitors are fitted on entry with a wristband that monitors heartbeat and physical reactions, feeding live biodata into the artworks themselves, which shift and respond in real time.
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A device worn around the neck releases a rotating sequence of 12 rainforest-inspired scents as visitors move through the galleries — fragrances developed in collaboration with L’Oréal Luxe, derived from Anadol’s Large Nature Model, an AI trained exclusively on nature data, according to Blooloop.
The museum spans five immersive galleries, anchored by a 1.5-billion-pixel Infinity Room in which spatial audio, scent and visuals combine into what critics who attended preview events described as a convergence of science experiment, art museum and immersive theme park, according to The Art Newspaper.
The museum’s AI infrastructure is powered entirely by Google Cloud, hosted in a low-carbon compute zone in Oregon running on 87 per cent carbon-free renewable energy, according to Arup, the global engineering firm that served as prime engineer on the project. Google’s involvement marks the culmination of a decade-long collaboration with Anadol that has previously explored quantum computing data and environmental datasets, according to Windows Report.
Anadol described Los Angeles as the natural home for the institution. “LA is the center of creativity,” he said in a statement cited by ArtNews. The museum is a for-profit enterprise, with tickets starting at 49 US dollars, according to The Art Newspaper. Membership starts at 350 US dollars per year, according to ArtNews.
Machine Dreams: Rainforest will run from today, June 20, through January 31, 2027.
A partnership with Google Arts and Culture will allow other artists access to DATALAND’s AI models to create new work for the space, according to The Art Newspaper, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic confirmed as a music collaborator for the museum’s programming.
For Nigeria and Africa, where conversations about AI, creativity and technology are accelerating across sectors from film to fashion, the opening of DATALAND represents a significant cultural moment.
The museum’s founding principle — that artificial intelligence, properly directed, can deepen humanity’s connection to the natural world rather than detach from it — carries particular resonance for a continent grappling with both the promise of AI-driven development and the environmental costs of the digital economy.
