DATALAND, the Los Angeles museum of AI art co-founded by Refik Anadol, has opened its first show, Machine Dreams: Rainforest. It runs until January 31, 2027.
The exhibition spreads over five galleries. It is generated by Anadol's Large Nature Model, trained on millions of images and sounds from 16 rainforests, and the museum says the data was licensed from partners such as the Smithsonian and Getty. Other partners include the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, iNaturalist and London's Natural History Museum, which it offers as its answer to copyright worries.
Visitors wear devices that track movement and biometric response so each visit plays out differently. That data is anonymised and deleted after 30 days. The show also uses a live environmental feed, soundscapes and scent, and one room is built around a hummingbird that Anadol dreamed in the Amazon. A Data Pavilion draws on more than a billion ecological data points, and its imagery shifts as real-world conditions change.
The museum says the model runs on mostly renewable energy and that a visit uses about as much as charging a phone. Its model runs on a Google Cloud server in Oregon said to be 87% carbon-free.
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