Chances are, you either see AI as an indispensable tool or a fundamental threat—it’s the type of technology that doesn’t seem to inspire many middle-of-the-road takes right now. But set aside your love or hate for ChatGPT for a few minutes to consider a very different sort of AI application.
DATALAND, which has dubbed itself the world’s first museum of AI arts, announced that it’ll debut in Downtown L.A. in spring 2026 (a bit later than its initial 2025 goal). The Refik Anadol Studio–helmed space will set up at the Grand L.A., the Frank Gehry–designed mixed-use complex across the street from the Walt Disney Concert Hall (which Anadol blanketed in projections back in 2018).
Turkish-born, L.A.-based artist Refik Anadol and his wife and studio cofounder Efsun Erkılıç have been translating troves of data into morphing images and rippling particles for about a decade. And DATALAND will house an installation inspired by one of Anadol’s very first pieces, an Infinity Room that he designed in 2014 at UCLA and debuted the following year as a piece of floor-to-ceiling projection. This latest iteration of his Infinity Room will incorporate AI-generated scents into the fold, pulled from the studio’s Large Nature Model—an open-source repository trained on audio, visual and environmental data from 16 rainforests across the planet.
The Infinity Room will anchor one of the five galleries within DATALAND’s 25,000-square-foot venue. While we don’t know much about the rest of the space quite yet—a press release notes that ticketing, membership and exhibition info will arrive “in the coming months”—we do know that DATALAND will partner with Google Arts & Culture for an artist residency program; three artists will be chosen for a six-month collaboration that’ll culminate in their pieces going on public display at DATALAND.
There’s a chance that you’ve already come across one of Anadol’s video installations in L.A., either projected onto the side of a Downtown building, housed within a Hollywood gallery or illuminated in front of the Clippers’ arena. If you haven’t, I’m not about to start lecturing you one way or another on how you should feel about the merits of AI art. But I will say that, based on my previous encounters with Anadol’s mesmerizing work, it’s at least worth pointing out that his data-driven, AI-enhanced art shouldn’t be conflated with the sort of low-effort AI slop—crying kittens, questionable cartoon character ripoffs and excrement-unloading fighter jets—that’s quickly consumed the Internet.
You’ll have to wait until next year in order to fully immerse yourself in what DATALAND has to say about AI art, but in the meantime, if you head over to the free Grand Ave Arts: All Access this Saturday, you can get a glimpse of what’s in store during a pop-up at the Grand.