In DATALAND, Refik Anadol Has Built a Museum That Learns From Its Audience

July 13, 2026 / Sophie Clearwater /

Housed in a Frank Gehry-designed space on Grand Avenue, dataland immerses visitors in 720 million pixels of rainforest imagery that shifts in response to their heartbeat. Photo: Jordan Riefe for Observer

The concept of a museum originated with cabinets of curiosities in the 16th century, rooms that contained anything from shrunken heads to narwhal tusks, reflecting the interests of their owners. When collections overflowed into other rooms, they were referred to as galleries, and a series of galleries, a museum. The world’s first public art museum, Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, dates to 1661, originated with the Amerbach Cabinet, a private collection that included works by Hans Holbein the Younger.

But what if the art on display doesn’t fit in a frame or on a pedestal? What if it swims across the walls, floor and ceiling, and is ever changing? What if its delivery system is a series of projectors, and it’s as ephemeral as a memory? Such questions might be posed by some visitors at the world’s first A.I. museum, DATALAND, recently opened in L.A., the brainchild of Refik Anadol, generally regarded as the world’s first A.I. artist, or at least its most prominent.

DATALAND occupies a Frank Gehry-designed space on Grand Avenue, across the street from the late great architect’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, and covers about 35,000 square feet, 10,000 of which houses servers that generate the art. Upon entry, visitors descend an escalator to a massive space, the Data Pavilion, 720 million pixels swimming with imagery inspired by the Yawanawá rainforest of the Amazon.

Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkiliç. Photo: Dustin Downing

Composed of an algorithmic 12 chapters, each one focuses on different data subject to artistic experimentation, what Anadol calls “a living sculpture,” abstract patterns of biomes—flora, fungi, trees and finally rain. “People can feel the thunderstorm atmosphere. It’s like a super surreal teleportation,” Anadol tells Observer. “We see fungi systems on the floor, on the ceiling. We see flowers appear as we smell.”

Scents come courtesy of L’Oreal’s Luxe division, just one of DATALAND’s contributors, providing olfactory data to complement visual imagery generated by the museum’s LNM (Large Nature Model), sourced from the Smithsonian, the Encyclopedia of Life, an online repository from the American Museum of Natural History, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Natural History Museum in London as well as data collected by Anadol’s own team of scientists, architects, artists and engineers.

“A.I. research requires thousands of people,” he says. “We found wonderful academicians recording LiDAR 3D scans of the trees. We found people from the Amazon, an amazing sound engineer. For nine years, he recorded binaural records of the forests across Amazonia. And then he said, ‘I’m able to give my data’. So, we have these incredible partnerships across the years that allowed us to make the foundation.”

In addition, Anadol’s team collects its own data, from 16 rainforests so far, including sound recordings, pigments from leaves, LiDAR scans and drone footage, making it all open to the public at no cost.

No trip through DATALAND is alike since the system responds to data emanating from viewers, transmitted by an electronic bracelet that measures heart rate and galvanic skin response indicating emotional arousal while LiDAR sensors on the walls calibrate movement. So, while you watch the artwork, the artwork watches you.

Less interactive is the Infinity Room showing Machine Dreams: Rainforest, inspired by a dream Anadol had about a glass hummingbird. He was told by a Yawanawá chief that it is a special bird called Ruwi (glass) Pinu (hummingbird), that only sings on its journey to take the last breath of the wisdom tree. Flying through a rainforest that unfolds all around you, it zeros in on the tree which shimmers before explosively dematerializing. At one point you fly into the eye of the bird where you experience a world of fungal and neural networks.

“We don’t want to change the mythology, but whenever the hummingbird smells and connects with the biome, the data tunnels, the memory tunnels are sensing the audience. The bird is listening to the heartbeat of the audience in the room,” Anadol explains, noting film producer Kathleen Kennedy (Jurassic Park, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial) called it the future of cinema. “I let this story feel the audience when it’s necessary. It’s a new way of telling a story. The audience becomes a reflection. The character can feel the emotions of the audience. We are experimenting with something never done before.”

The Infinity Room at DATALAND incorporates A.I.-generated scents. Courtesy DATALAND

Refik Anadol grew up in Istanbul, the son of teachers, and was drawn to computers early—teaching himself to program at age 8, not long after watching the film Blade Runner and becoming captivated by the question of what a machine might make of human memory. He studied photography and video before earning an MFA in visual communication from Istanbul’s Bilgi University, later earning a second MFA in design media arts at UCLA.

His thesis work, Quadrature, featured monochromatic imagery projected on the facade of the Santral Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art, with patterns shifting in response to sounds from the surrounding neighborhood—architecture made responsive. The piece established him as one of Europe’s most exciting voices in digital art. In 2018, WDCH Dreams fed the L.A. Philharmonic’s archives into an A.I. model and projected the results across the curving panels of the concert hall, turning institutional memory into spectacle. A year later, Machine Hallucination opened ARTECHOUSE’s Chelsea Market space in New York, training the same A.I.-driven eye on the city’s built environment to produce a portrait of urban transformation in constant flux. Since then, Anadol’s work has appeared in museums, corporate and commercial institutions worldwide, with his latest, Living Building, decorating the lobby of Norman Foster’s JPMorgan Chase Global Headquarters on Park Avenue.

Like Unsupervised, which appeared at MoMA for nearly a year in 2022-23 before becoming part of the permanent collection, Sanctuary contains a wall of liquid movement that morphs into a churning mass of flowers threatening to burst from its confines and flood the space. It is (by Anadol’s standards) a more conventional piece, familiar in form to most viewers of his work. New York Times writer Travis Diehl derisively likened Unsupervised to a screensaver, while noted New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz called it a giant lava lamp. But for every detractor there are defenders like Los Angeles County Museum of Art CEO Michael Govan, who compared Anadol to Marcel Duchamp, emphasizing the process behind the artwork.

No two visits to this 35,000-square-foot museum are alike because the art is always watching. Photo: Jordan Riefe for Observer

Anadol remains unruffled by criticism. “If someone distills it down to a simple object or a feeling, most likely that person doesn’t have the right knowledge, experience and the wisdom of this new medium,” he explains. “Once the process comes into the game, which is extremely complex and requires a new craftsmanship, a new atelier, new studio, new Bottega, that requires a new research.”

Machine Dreams: Rainforest ends with the lonely call of the last Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, a native bird of Hawaii that was recorded before it became extinct. It seems to echo concerns many have about predictions that A.I. has a 2-20 percent chance of bringing about human extinction this century.

“I know that it’s a heavy ending, and I know it will touch people’s mind and soul. And by the way, art happens when it touches the mind and soul,” Anadol says, reflecting on existential concerns. “It’s a moment to remind us that data is a form of memory, not just a number.”