Dataland: First Reaction

Refik Anadol, The Dream of Ruwe Pinu. Dataland, Los Angeles

It's got to be a tough time to open a museum of AI art. Public sentiment on artificial intelligence has turned sharply Luddite. One of the more popular books on the subject is titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. IPOs have created a trillionaire and creators are feeling exploited. 

Against this backdrop artist Refik Anadol has opened Dataland, billed as the first AI art museum. It's not a typical museum, being a for-profit institution sponsored by big tech and lifestyle brands. Despite the subsidies, Dataland's ticket prices are steep ($49 and up). Its competition is not so much MOCA and the Broad (which are free) but immersive pop-ups like the Hospital of Emotions.

A museum generally shows many artworks by many artists. Dataland's initial exhibition, "Machine Dreams: Rainforest" consists mainly of four walk-in gallery installations by Anadol and his studio. There are plans to eventually bring in other artists for residencies and exhibit their work.

Refik Anadol

During my visit Anadol himself was there, posing for selfies and introducing the exhibition. Dataland begins with apologies. Visitors are told that the neural network was trained from ethically sourced data and that incremental visitors' energy requirements were comparable to that of charging a phone. I get it—no puppies were killed. Yet Dataland's art is funded by corporations whose ethical standing is murkier. (In other words, just like a regular museum.)

One paragraph of Dataland's 6-page Participation Form & Waiver

Before stepping into the galleries, visitors must put on shoe covers and sign a release that reads like the fine print in a pharmaceutical commercial. 

Discovery Portal

Dataland has five galleries, each a specific rectangular space with wall-size video screens, projections, and/or mirrors. The first, Discovery Portal, is an orientation room loosely suggesting a spaceship. You scan your phone to open a box containing wrist biosensors and neck-mounted scent collars. Dataland is a pan-sense experience, with the collars offering digital Smell-o-Vision ("developed through extensive molecular research with L'Oréal Luxe"). 

Latent Forest

Gallery A: Data Pavilion / Latent Forest

A bank of escalators lead down into a large space of projected abstractions with mirrored ceiling and pillars. It's much like other immersive attractions except that it's Anadol's trippy abstractions rather than bastardized van Gogh. 

Touch screen in Latent Gallery

Gallery B: Latent Gallery

This is a DIY space, with touch screens you can draw on to create weird imagery. Gallery B also offers chocolates (extra charge) imagineered by some kind of AI witchcraft and realized by Los Angeles chocolatier Valerie Confections. The chocolate I sampled was a fetid-turning-scrumptious with an aftertaste of hot chili oil. There's no bad chocolate, but I'm not mystified that Valerie doesn't normally sell this. 

The Dream of Ruwe Pinu

The Dream of Ruwe Pinu

Gallery C: Infinity Room / The Dream of Ruwe Pinu

This piece seems to be everyone's favorite. Despite the name, the Infinity Room is not a rip-off of Yayoi Kusama, Lucas Samaras, or good old-fashioned houses of mirrors. It is more an exercise in virtual reality without goggles. High-res moving imagery is mapped onto the interior walls of a cube. The work occupying this space, The Dream of Ruwe Pinu, is based on a dream Anadol had on a visit to the Amazonian rainforest, as interpreted by an Indigenous spiritual leader. The artwork has more the sensibility of Disney(land) than what we think of as serious art, and it wraps up with a bit of maudlin sentimentality. Yet it's hard not to be wowed.

Machine Hallucinations: Rainforest

Gallery D: The Sanctuary / Machine Hallucinations: Rainforest

For many, AI art started with Anadol's Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations—MoMA (2021–2023), shown at and acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. (Jerry Saltz called it a screen saver.) Gallery D's Machines Hallucinations: Rainforest is generally similar. A towering trompe l'oeil white cube appears and is soon filled with a blobby moving abstraction. Initially it's made up of little particles; at a later stage it becomes swarming garlands of plastic-looking flowers. This may be the piece that's easiest to credit as "real" art. It connects to the history of abstraction and adds something new.

Machine Hallucinations: Rainforest

I liked Dataland, more than I expected. My reservations center on its relationship to film. Start with the text. There is a lot of text throughout. It's like the text you've seen in a zillion sci-fi movies: all-cap sans serif, mostly offering needless information (like the current temperature of points in the Amazonian rain forest). It seems unnecessary: AI art doesn't have to look futuristic.

The soundtrack is equally cinematic. It begins, in the lobby, with a spa's ambient drones. In the main galleries it ramps up to full cinematic swells. Every beat is calculated to push emotional buttons, just as in a big, serious movie. I guess many will like that, but I don't. I wish the soundtrack was as strange as the visuals.

The colors! Everything is oversaturated. I'm left wondering what a resident artist could do with a palette more like Hammershoi. Try some moody colors already.

Is AI art "real" art? It doesn’t take much imagination to foresee that AI will become a common medium for art, the way video or studio glass or oil paint did. The question is, is there much worthwhile AI art now? Dataland is certain to be part of that conversation. 

"Machine Dreams: Rainforest" will run through early 2027. Dataland is at 100 S Grand Ave., across from Disney Hall. 

A gestural robot arm creates AbEx paintings