Artificial intelligence is about to take on a physical form in Los Angeles: DATALAND, which touts itself as the world’s first museum of AI arts, will open at the Grand L.A. in Downtown Los Angeles in 2025.
The museum is the brainchild of cofounders Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkiliç, who are both behind L.A.’s Refik Anadol Studio. Anadol’s data-driven works have been exhibited across the globe, and here in L.A., there’s a good chance you’ve seen one of his trippy video installations: either projected onto the Walt Disney Concert Hall or the side of a DTLA building, housed inside a Hollywood gallery or illuminated outside of the new Clippers arena.
According to an official press release, DATALAND will feature “art experiences blending human imagination and artificial intelligence, establishing a new model for artistic expression at the onset of the digital age.” So what can you actually expect? Here’s everything we know so far.
What kind of art will it explore?
Although not many details have been released about the sort of art that will be on display at DATALAND, the museum says that the inaugural exhibition “will be expressed through Refik Anadol Studio’s Large Natural Model, the world’s first open-source AI model based solely on nature data.” Think of it as a massive repository of information about the natural world; according to the L.A. Times, this includes millions of public images and sounds from the collections of the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
What does that mean on a practical level? If it’s like Anadol’s previous pieces, you can expect a mix of photographic scenes of the natural world that morph into each other, as well as massive videos of undulating particles that are driven by real-time data.
Where is the AI art museum opening in L.A.?
DATALAND will debut sometime next year inside the shopping center portion of the Grand L.A., the mixed-used development anchored by hotel and condo towers atop Bunker Hill (you might’ve been there for the Basquiat exhibition last year).
Designed by Frank Gehry (who was also behind the Walt Disney Concert Hall across the street), the destination is only steps away from some more traditional cultural institutions, including MOCA, the Broad, the Colburn School, Disney Hall and REDCAT.
Why is AI art often controversial? And what makes this different?
Some believe that any piece of art outputted by AI—along with any other content created using the technology—is not original and more of an amalgamation of preexisting images. If a model is trained on copyrighted or private materials, then copyright infringement issues and privacy risks are also of concern, not to mention the computational energy costs.
But DATALAND says it’ll use “ethical data-gathering and AI practices.” As the L.A. Times elaborates, Anadol secured permission for all of the sourced imaged and conducted research on servers that use renewable energy.