Refik Anadol isn’t just any artist, said Laura Hertzfeld in The Art Newspaper. He’s “a mad scientist who is translating one of the most complicated questions of our time—how we can use AI for human connection and deeper understanding—into a visceral experience.” At Dataland, a new Los Angeles attraction developed by Anadol and billed as the world’s first AI arts museum, the 40-year-old Turkish American innovator has created an immersive exhibit, “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” that “captures something that has been lost in many museums’ experiments with new technology—a sense of joy.” Visitors entering the show don neck rings and wrist bands, the first to add the aromas of earth and flowers to the multi-sensory experience, the second to adjust the visual displays to each person’s emotional response. In the five galleries that lie ahead, digital data drawn from 16 rainforests produce ever-changing images set to orchestral music, creating an experience that’s “part science experiment, and part immersive theme park.”
“Dataland is an entertainment complex designed to astonish,” said R. Daniel Foster in Forbes. In the cavernous first gallery, “enormous flowers unfurl and sail away into fractals” while “light tunnels into new worlds” and “flocks of birds, if they are indeed birds, dive and soar.” The images are often realistic but sometimes “burst into fields of data,” as if the AI generator “has remembered that it is indeed not sentient.” Meanwhile, the “overwrought” orchestral music, blasted through 250 speakers spread throughout the show, “hits you from everywhere.” As a person who’s neurodivergent, said Julia Paskin in LAist, “I revel in sensory stimulation but can also find it overwhelming, even physically painful.” In that first gallery, “both experiences were true for me.” On the plus side, “it was the closest experience to being on a psychedelic you can get without consuming anything.”
Before visitors enter the show, they may experience shock at the ticket window, said Daniel Farr in the New York Post. Adult tickets start at $49 and reach $79 at peak times, making Dataland “one of the priciest museum experiences in Los Angeles.” But “if experiential spaces are the new films, then Dataland is Citizen Kane,” said Ann Hirsch in Artnet. A generative-art project Anadol installed in 2023 at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art was dismissed as a high-tech lava lamp, but this show “feels so real you could live inside it.” You might have questions about how your heart rate and skin temperature, as measured by your wristband, affect the images the AI generates from its data banks. But those questions don’t matter. “The data is neither the content nor the form; it’s the paint,” and Anadol has used that paint to create an incredible experience. “My 6-year-old left Dataland saying she wanted to go back every day. That may be the highest praise an artist can receive.”