ALL SENSATION,
LITTLE REVELATION

A high-tech amusement park
disguised as a museum.

While the world loses its collective mind over artificial intelligence’s encroachment on every facet of our lives, with calls to restrict AI, Refik Anadol Studio has plunged wholeheartedly in the opposite direction with the opening of DATALAND, the world’s first Museum of AI Arts, at The Grand in downtown Los Angeles. Pledging to bridge the gap between man and machine, it aims to be more than just another Instagrammable “museum.” Alas, it’s so taken with the romance of “data” that it neglects to teach, to be the mediator between the brain and the hands.

To experience DATALAND, we are first ushered into a dark gallery with vertical screens filled with computer gibberish and colorful AI imagery. There, in a breathtaking presentation straight out of Hollywood, we are given an Empatica EmbracePlus smartwatch and a neckband fragrance diffuser from L’Oréal Luxe. The EmbracePlus tracks your every movement, monitors heart rate, skin conductivity and temperature, motion acceleration, and who knows what else, all to compute your “Emotional Temperature,” something never explained. The diffuser, in sync with your location inside the museum and the video installations, blows twelve scents in your face, each created using DATALAND’s Large Nature Model.

If your eyes glaze over at the mere mention of “blockchain,” then I’m confident that talk of AI models also bores you to tears (as it does me, and I have a master’s degree in computer science!). Briefly, Anadol licensed enormous datasets of rainforest information (like photos, real-time sensors, audio) from institutions, as well as visiting rainforests on his own, and then trained an AI model on it all, calling it the Large Nature Model, which is touted as the world’s first model based on nature data. Much of the imagery is based on this model. AI requires some amount of human manipulation, sometimes significant, but DATALAND doesn’t explain how people are involved when it creates its AI video, AI perfumes, AI chocolates (yes, they’re selling AI chocolate), so, for ease of language, I’ll just call everything AI.

We then descend into the first room of DATALAND’s inaugural exhibition, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, currently running the “Latent Forest.” The room itself, called the Data Pavilion, is a giant empty space that serves as a projection surface for 84 video projectors mounted up high and 200 speakers. (Anadol touts that DATALAND’s AI energy consumption is negligible, at just a day’s charge of a single cell phone, but what about the energy used in this room alone?) It’s a fully animated, imaginary forest. Birds fly by. Music evoking Richard Wagner is all around. You can wave your hand against the picture and create a breeze of leaves. Roots grow at your feet. In spite of the stuttery video and constantly blinding projector lamps, I was actually kind of impressed and wanted to try, but then I learned that the space has dead zones, lots of them, so I ended up looking at the machine interacting with other people and not me. This thing on my wrist is supposed to enable the system to listen and react to me. You’d think the computer would therefore sense my disappointment and approach me tenderly like a cat or something, but nothing. Meanwhile, L’Oréal’s scent novelty quickly wore off.

The rainforest scene soon ended, shifting to a series of completely unrelated tech demos. Think abstract sci-fi scenes, particles, warps, and whooshes, changing as if on a timer. Unlike “Latent Forest,” these are non-interactive videos. Occasionally, pleasantly disorienting, especially while walking, they came across, essentially, as screen savers.

Leaving the Data Pavilion, we then enter the Latent Gallery, a central hub that serves as the waiting room for DATALAND’s three galleries. (DATALAND says there are five, but that’s a stretch.) Here, there are three futuristic transparent touch screens that allow visitors to use the underlying data. The first is a drawing program that allows you to paint with an AI “thinking brush.” You touch the screen, and the paint changes color. That’s it. The second kiosk allows you to peruse the data itself. I encountered thousands of tiny, near-identical photos of flowers with no accompanying information. Who wants to do research in the middle of a waiting room for what’s turning out to be an amusement park attraction? The third kiosk added a camera, basically combining it with the brush, producing an effect similar to a thermal camera. Meanwhile, a spotlight mounted high in a corner darted between visitors like the Eye of Sauron.

Here in the Latent Gallery comes DATALAND’s first upsell: AI chocolate. If you like fancy chocolate that (frankly) doesn’t taste very good (of which I include dark chocolate)—not that this chocolate was unappetizing—then maybe this will give you a rise. I’d rather spend money and carbs I shouldn’t on Cadbury and Teuscher.

Now comes the so-called “Infinity Room.” Unlike Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms, which actually produce infinity, DATALAND’s version is merely a cubic room with LED panels completely covering five of the six surfaces of the room. In here is “The Dream of Ruwe Pinu,” a video that swoops us through an AI rainforest and has something to do with a glass hummingbird. It has all the depth of a ride simulator, which this essentially is, except we stand and are free to move around. The immersion is fleetingly convincing. It would be more impressive, were it not for other people always in my field of view and the room’s seams being visible and reflective. Anadol visited a rainforest and consulted with a tribal leader to create this, and I learned absolutely nothing from this video that’s more suited for selling HDTVs than connecting me with nature or some junk.

The final gallery housed “Machine Hallucinations: Rainforest.” This is where all of DATALAND’s ideas should have come together, where we see the machine react to us in real time. Not quite. Based on our collective emotional temperature (we are judged to be “excited,” “engaged,” and “contemplative”—most certainly a euphemism), the system chooses one of three outcomes to display. On one end of the room is a 30-foot-tall LED screen displaying colored particle swirlies that wax and wane in a white box. On the other, a giant screen shows what the system is currently gathering about us, using a bewildering display of charts, numbers, and graphs that don’t mean anything. I felt no connection to my data or the art. As far as I was concerned, they could play the same thing for everybody.

Upon leaving the galleries, we are each given a cardboard “data token,” memorializing our trip to the museum and serving as the seed for individualized AI upselling. Should you feel so inclined, you can buy AI perfume, an AI T-shirt, even a giant robot-executed AI painting, all unique to your data. And since the art changes daily (based on… something), they offer yearly memberships for an eye-watering price.

Right by the exit, there is one more screen, one more chance for DATALAND to prove itself. Tapping the data token to the screen brings up a map tracing my route through the museum, surely a preview of our dystopian future. It then proceeds to have the impudence to tell me how I felt, and for it to be a load of BS.

To visit DATALAND is to be assaulted by an astounding amount of magical data woo, a hellish combination of office jargon, academese, and non-profit speak—all meaningless filler that saps your brain dry. The art is bright, colorful, and pretty, but never escapes the feeling of being corporate wall art. Go see their work for free at the Beverly Center instead.

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦

photos by Nick McCall for  Stage and Cinema

Machine Dreams: Rainforest
DATALAND at The Grand LA, 100 S. Grand Ave. in Los Angeles
open daily (closed Mon)
ends Jan 31, 2027
for tickets, visit DATALAND

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦