Dataland: First Reaction
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| 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.
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| 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.)
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| 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.
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| 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").
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| 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.
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| 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 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.
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| The Dream of Ruwe Pinu |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| A gestural robot arm creates AbEx paintings |
Comments
The admission price is a non-starter.
> more than I
> expected.
Reminds me of aspects of the World Cup. Not a soccer fan, so the WC's popularity shoots straight over my head. But people get into the spirit all over the nation, not as much, however, in one of the the other host countries Canada. Watch parties are a big thing in host cities, although for the games themselves ticket prices haven't allowed for SRO.
> ...Dataland's ticket prices are steep...
> Its competition is not so much
> MOCA and the Broad (which
> are free)...
I wonder what will be the shelf life of Refik Anadol's project? Dataland is in space available to him because the economy has forced the landlord's hands. The AI museum is in space built for a retail mall, but that type of usage has cratered, and not just in downtown LA, but other cities too.
The same owner also controls Hudson Yards in Manhattan. But instead of a Dataland, HY has a sightseeing structure known as the Vessel. Some of its space for retail is shaky too, while closer to Dataland, Santa Monica several miles to the west is hurting.
As for the Geffen Galleries, critiques of it always interest me. Reactions to Govan's/Zumthor's place are like the Rashomon effect, no two opinions are exactly alike and none of them is predictable.
https://youtu.be/pR7fUpf61rA?si=snm6FkDLkikuouqN
^ The guy or woman likes things the other doesn't (or that I don't either), the guy or woman dislikes things the other doesn't mind (or that I don't mind either) .
If the internet and social media existed in 1965, I imagine LACMA would have been greeted by a similar back-and-fro. Or, "as much as things change, some things never change." Or, "history is repeating itself."
The surprise is that LACMA’s new expansion has none of the contemporary dialectics we might be familiar with—no overt presentation of problems, program, crisis, community, nostalgia, urbanism, or complexity. This LACMA building cannot be understood simply by description or experience. It offers the medium of architecture itself as the answer. It demands to be called new by summoning its own confidence to stand still.
Its success is that it is not present, or at least it’s somewhere far off. Mediation becomes its encounter. Size its pleasure. Distance is its leading gesture, creating an expansive space between now and then, between art and ourselves, between architecture and society, between Los Angeles and its museum. It makes the continuous present available to us by making room for it.
Luis Ortega Govela, brooklynrail. org:
LACMA becomes the symbol of the twenty-first-century city: splintered and raised above its own autoscape, compressed and extended, suspended in clear air. Artists always want to capture LA—Edward Ruscha, Harold Altman, Eve Babitz.
As Hollywood is on its last breath, Zumthor is teaching the city how to see itself. Instead of the indoor/outdoor “Selling Sunset” trap, we are dealt an upstairs/downstairs. In the words of William Mulholland: “There it is. Take it.” [End quote]
^ Hey, I just want to know if Govan and his staff are going to fill up more of the blank concrete walls and expanses of barren concrete floors with artwork.
I now can't even worry about whether more walls should be tinted, windows should be blocked or whether contemporary works (already in the BCAM and often in the Resnick too) should be mixed in with older periods of art.
Just as Brown/Pereira won in 1965, Govan/Zumthor have won in 2026. I give up, Count-ey Museum (said in southern drawl---lol).
Brian Merchant explains: “ The real Luddites—the machine breakers who rose up at the dawn of the first Industrial Revolution to smash the looms and wide frames that factory owners were using to automate their labor—were not opposed to technology. They were opposed to the way technology was being used against them. That is, the Luddites objected to the industrialists who used machinery to depress wages, evade labor laws, and degrade the quality of products in order to profit at their expense.”
You won’t find that distinction in Google or ChatGPT, which repeat the erroneous claim of being “anti-technology.” That’s because those sources know which side their bread is buttered on, so they’re content to be deceptive - which is another issue with the unregulated tech bros who are in charge.
Dataland is pretty, diverting and vacuous.