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Inside Refik Anadol's Dataland, the world’s first AI art museum

An immersive “laboratory of imagination” from Anadol's studio boots up in Downtown Los Angeles

Laura Hertzfeld

18 June 2026

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The immersive Machine Dreams: Rainforest, one of Dataland’s opening experiences, was inspired by Refik Anadol’s visit to the Amazon<br>Photo: Refik Anadol Studio; © 2026 Refik Anadol Studio/Dataland

It is a sunny, warm California day outside, but stepping into Dataland, visitors are taken from the skyscraper-laced Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles straight to the Amazon rainforests and beyond, in an immersive, imagined future where machines and the natural world come together. The artist Refik Anadol’s Dataland has taken over 25,000 sq. ft in the Frank Gehry-designed Grand LA development, located just across from the architect’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, onto which Anadol projected one of his early data pieces back in 2018. The Dataland experience is part science experiment, part deeply reverent art museum and part immersive theme park.<br>A lifelong movie fan, Anadol is a bit like Jurassic Park’s John Hammond (as played by Richard Attenborough), 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 that both asks visitors to use their imaginations and grounds itself in actual data.<br>Anadol believes artists have a role to play in the conversations about AI, and Dataland is his contribution. “As an artist pioneering this field for ten years, I felt that we should have a kind of responsibility,” he says. “This is a laboratory of imagination. We have walls, but no limits in the ideation.”<br>The museum uses over half a billion pixels to create rooms that reflect the natural world (using datasets from collaborations with the Smithsonian Institution, Getty et al.) and our own bodies. A technology pack with a wristband tracks visitors’ heartbeats and physical reactions to the art and feeds them into the work itself. A ring goes around attendees’ necks, providing a rotating combination of 12 scents designed with the olfactory team at L’Oreal Luxe and triggered by the live biodata.<br>One of the inaugural exhibits at Dataland Photo: Refik Anadol Studio; © 2026 Refik Anadol Studio/Dataland

Going through the museum, Anadol makes sure that, as images evolve, scents change and music shifts, visitors catch every bit of the work that has gone into creating this Disneyland for art and tech. Anadol’s delight captures something that has been lost in many more traditional museums’ experiments with new technology—a sense of joy.<br>That is not the only thing setting Dataland apart from traditional museums. It is a for-profit enterprise, with tickets starting at $49. For Anadol, the effort and expense—for visitors and the museum itself—are part of turning the museum experience on its head. “For 5,000 years, we looked at artworks and we felt something, right? Now, my challenge question is: ‘Can the artwork feel us back?’”<br>His first attempt to answer that question is Machine Dreams: Rainforest, which was inspired by a visit to the Amazon, where Anadol met with Indigenous leaders in the Yawanawá community, which is largely cut off from modern technology. Of the inaugural experiences at Dataland, it is the most narratively driven and uses Anadol’s Large Nature Model to follow a story that came to him in a dream about a hummingbird in the forest, creating a throughline between data and the artist’s experience.<br>“This bird symbolises a focus and attention to nature,” Anadol says, but it “also reminds us of real data from the real world and a real memory of nature”. He adds: “The chief of the tribe allowed us to visualise this dream.”<br>A scent-sual experience<br>The Infinity Room gallery relies more heavily on visitors giving themselves over to the possibilities of technology and a suspension of disbelief about how pixels and binaries can become waves of images. It will also be more familiar to visitors who already know Anadol’s work, as it has appeared in some form in more than 35 cities since its inception in 2015.<br>As the introduction begins, a scent wafts up that is reminiscent of taking a hike first thing in the morning—at least, that is what this writer smelled; other visitors may have a different experience. Every few minutes, a scent shifts and someone in the gallery exclaims: “Do you smell that one?!”<br>Visitors explored one of the interactive exhibits at Dataland in Los Angeles Photo: Refik Anadol Studio; © 2026 Refik Anadol Studio/Dataland

While the outputs generated from the AI inputs and each person’s experience will differ somewhat, the...