Artist Refik Anadol creates immersive worlds using artificial intelligence. Image: keystone
A museum for AI-generated art is being built in Los Angeles under the name “Dataland”. The first exhibition opens on June 20th and immerses visitors in a digital rainforest.
May 2, 2026, 9:06 p.mMay 2, 2026, 9:06 p.m
An AI-generated exhibition on the topics of nature and the rainforest. Considering how resource-intensive the creation of AI-generated content is, it seems an ambivalent project. “Sustainability is not a restriction that we circumvent, but a condition that we build on,” says digital artist and exhibitor Refik Anadol to the US media company NPR.
Thanks to special cloud servers in Oregon, which are powered by 87 percent CO2-neutral renewable energy, a person’s visit to the exhibition only uses as much electricity as charging a smartphone, Anadol continued. The Turkish-American artist, together with Efsun Erkilic, is curating the first exhibition “Machine Dreams: Rainforest” at the new AI art museum Dataland in Los Angeles.
The digital rainforest should be more than just a projection on a screen. Opposite the Los Angeles Times Anadol promises visitors a “multisensory, multimedia experience”: “sound, image, video, text, smell, taste and touch. They are all in a dialogue.”
Anadol and Erkilic were inspired by a trip to the Amazon rainforest. The two took part according to the Art magazine Artnet perceive the rainforest as a large networked intelligence. After returning home, they began developing a freely accessible AI model that was fed millions of natural images and sounds. They then ordered their “Large Nature Model,” as they called it, to learn how nature behaves and interact accordingly.
The result is an immersive world that extends across the entire five exhibition rooms of the new museum. The fact that projects like these cannot do without huge amounts of data sets and that this data, especially in the artistic field, also consists of the work of other artists, always causes excitement in the art world.
«I know that many artists don’t want to disclose their technologies, but for me AI means possibilities. And opportunity comes with responsibility. We have to disclose exactly where our data comes from.” All data used for the “Machine Dreams: Rainforest” project came from sources that explicitly approved their use for the project, Anadol told the Los Angeles Times. (July)