Refik Anadol, the artist renowned for his mesmerizing data visualizations, is set to open the world’s first artificial intelligence (A.I.) art museum, named Dataland, in Los Angeles in 2025. This museum will provide a permanent home for the A.I. works that Anadol has been creating for the past decade, solidifying his significant influence in the digital art scene.

Dataland will be located in the Grand L.A., a mixed-use development designed by Frank Gehry, which includes a luxury hotel, apartments, and entertainment facilities. This new addition will join a vibrant cultural corridor in Downtown Los Angeles, which already features the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Broad, and the Walt Disney Hall.

Anadol, originally from Turkey, moved to Los Angeles in 2012 to study design media arts at UCLA, where he has also taught for the past decade. In 2014, he founded Refik Anadol Studio with his partner Efsun Erkiliç, pioneering a new form of art that transforms massive datasets into visual spectacles. Notable projects include visualizing 40,000 hours of recordings by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and data from the International Space Station.

Dataland will feature exhibitions created using the Large Nature Model, an open-source tool that incorporates data from institutions like the Smithsonian and London’s Natural History Museum. The museum aims to use sustainable energy sources, partnering with Google to minimize its environmental impact.

Anadol expressed his excitement about the project, stating, “L.A. has long been a city that looks to the future in art, music, cinema, architecture, and it feels natural to open Dataland here. To have a permanent space for us to develop a new paradigm of what a museum can be, by fusing human imagination with machine intelligence and the most advanced technologies available, is a realization of one of my biggest dreams”.

 
 Sayart / Amia Nguyen, amyngwyen13@gmail.com