DATALAND launches in Los Angeles with Machine Dreams Rainforest
DATALAND Los Angeles opens on June 20, 2026, as the Museum of AI Arts, founded by Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç at The Grand LA in downtown Los Angeles. Located within the Frank Gehry-designed complex in the Grand Avenue Cultural District, the museum launches with Machine Dreams: Rainforest, an inaugural exhibition by Refik Anadol Studio on view until January 31, 2027.
Created as a living museum for artistic expression in the age of machine intelligence—bringing to life Refik Anadol Studio’s vision for a reimagined museum model—DATALAND brings together architecture, data, computation and sensory experience. Its opening places Los Angeles at the centre of a new institutional format dedicated to AI Arts, where digital systems become part of the museum’s creative framework. For Anadol and Erkılıç, the project reflects a long-term vision for a public space where artists, scientists, architects and engineers can work across disciplines.
Machine Dreams: Rainforest unfolds across DATALAND’s five galleries as an immersive journey through the intelligence of the natural world. The exhibition takes its starting point from Anadol and Erkılıç’s time in the Amazon rainforest, where dense ecological systems shaped the artist’s understanding of nature as an interconnected field of light, moisture, sound and time. Refik Anadol Studio translates this experience into a sequence of environments where machine intelligence processes ecological memory into image, atmosphere and movement.
At the centre of the exhibition is the Large Nature Model, Refik Anadol Studio’s open-access, nature-based AI model trained on one of the world’s largest datasets of the natural world. Developed through ecological archives and first-hand data collected from 16 rainforest environments, the model generates responsive AI Data Paintings, AI Data Sculptures and spatial experiences. Subtle changes from distant rainforest ecosystems influence temperature, light and visual form inside the museum, creating a dynamic connection between landscape and architecture.
This synthesis of machine learning and ecological datasets directly expands the immersive vocabulary unveiled when Refik Anadol’s Echoes of the Earth exhibition at Serpentine North Gallery first materialized rainforest archives into dynamic London data sculptures.
The exhibition also extends Anadol and Erkılıç’s ongoing relationship with the Yawanawá people, whose ancestral knowledge, healing songs and story of Ruwe Pinu inform the project’s cultural dimension. This collaboration follows Winds of Yawanawá, a generative AI blockchain collection combining live weather data from the Sacred Village with works by young Yawanawá artists. Presented internationally, the project helped support Indigenous cultural initiatives and land preservation in the Amazon, establishing an important foundation for Machine Dreams: Rainforest.
Machine Dreams: Rainforest marks the first chapter for DATALAND as a museum dedicated to AI Arts. Developed by Refik Anadol Studio’s collective of artists, scientists, architects and engineers, the exhibition presents art as a process unfolding in real time through data, computation and human presence. Reflecting broader shifts highlighted in our conversation with Sybille de Saint Louvent, DATALAND opens with a project that connects rainforest ecosystems, machine intelligence and immersive storytelling into a new cultural environment. This critical reimagining of artificial intelligence in relation to human consciousness also takes physical form where Cognitive Bloom reimagines domestic AI for critical thinking, proposing contemplative household objects designed by Map Project Office and Chanwoo Lee.
All images ©Refik Anadol Studio for Dataland, shared with permission
