Turkish artist Refik Anadol will open the world’s first AI art museum, “Dataland,” in 2025 in Los Angeles, US. The new museum will become a permanent home for AI-generated art and will show Anadol’s most captivating works from the last decade, when algorithmic art has already taken center stage.
It will be located at the Grand L.A., designed by Frank Gehry. The space is designed to be more than just a static gallery, with a full immersion into dynamic, ever-evolving AI-driven experiences.
Refik Anadol, with Efsun Erkilic, founded the Refik Anadol Studio in 2014 and has pioneered a new form of art using complex data sets to create striking visual masterworks. One notable piece created with AI is “Unsupervised,” based on the collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art, comprising 138,000 pieces.
The Dataland will be spread over 20,000 square meters and will engage an avant-garde AI model, the Large Nature Model, which has been trained on data provided by leading institutions such as the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum, and Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The different works of art to be exhibited are created on these very varied data sets, demonstrating unlimited creative capabilities courtesy of AI.
“L.A. has long been a city that looks to the future in art, music, cinema, architecture, and it feels natural to open Dataland here,” Anadol stated and added, “To have a permanent space for us to develop a new paradigm of what a museum can be, by fusing human imagination with machine intelligence and the most advanced technologies available, is a realization of one of my biggest dreams.”
However, Anadol is sensitive to the broader social questions concerning technology, ensuring those conversations are part of the museum’s narrative. With the unveiling of Dataland, a new debate about AI and art is likely to be fired up most poignantly in Los Angeles, the city that recently, last year, was at the epicenter of the writers’ strike over AI replacing human artists. Though many claim that works produced with AI cannot be considered “art,” Anadol thinks otherwise; for him, AI is a collaborator, not a replacement for human ingenuity.
