With Dataland, Refik Anadol transforms rainforest data, scent, sound, and human emotion into an immersive dreamscape that reimagines art for the future
Words by ELIZABETH KHURI CHANDLER
Photography by REFIK ANADOL STUDIO
A dreamscape of art and sound generated by AI will blow your mind this summer when DATALAND in downtown L.A. opens with the exhibition Machine Dreams: Rainforest. The world’s first museum of AI arts, it’s the culmination of a fascinating journey for media artist Refik Anadol and his partner in life and cofounder Efsun Erkılıç as they pioneer the use of data with human-manipulated AI and push the boundaries between humans and machines.
The result is an experience that is as physical as it is digital. At Dataland, visitors will be fitted with a wristband to track heartbeat and skin temperature, as well as a neck device designed to emit 12 custom scents, before they descend into five galleries kitted out with 84 high-resolution projectors, 3,500 square feet of LED panels, and 250 L-Acoustics speakers. Plunged into a digital universe presented on 1.5 billion pixels, all five senses are stimulated. Visitors’ individual reactions of joy, fear, and rumination — as expressed through their vitals — are fed back into the system in real time as the art responds to what they see, hear, and smell on an individual level.
“It’s not utopian thinking to be able to have a conversation with nature,” Anadol says. “Here emotions inspire the artworks. That’s the breakthrough.”
That philosophy extends to Dataland itself, which the media artist describes as the world’s first omni-sensory museum. It’s fitting that the first work should be devoted to Mother Earth. Born in Istanbul on the Bosphorus, Anadol grew up surrounded by water. Over the years the artist and designer has used “data as pigment,” collecting vast datasets, including wind patterns, coral imagery, and glacier monitoring statistics. His studio’s work has been featured at MoMA in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Sphere in Las Vegas, as well as projected onto the Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A. (which sits opposite the new museum). As Google’s former artist in residence, he is also beloved by Silicon Valley.
“It’s not utopian thinking to be able to have a conversation with nature.”
When Anadol and Erkılıç went to the Amazon in 2021, they spent a great deal of time with the Yawanawa people in Brazil, who see their role as caretakers of the rainforest. “The rainforest is not just the lungs of the planet; it’s the heart of the planet,” Anadol says. The journey fundamentally altered his thinking about trained networks and environmental preservation, and he began to think of nature as a vast interconnected intelligence. Then, two years later, large language models (LLMs) exploded into the public imagination.
As a result, Anadol decided to dedicate all his time and resources to creating an LLM about nature and using AI for good, gathering images of flora and fauna and sounds from 16 different rainforests, and voices from tiny Indigenous communities. “AI can preserve language,” he says. “We are creating a model with language spoken by only 70 people.”
Called the Large Nature Model, it forms the cornerstone of Machine Dreams (which also includes data from partners including the Smithsonian Institution and the Natural History Museum in London), a process that is part computation, part choreography, as an Anadol Studio–developed custom algorithm turns the vast collection of images into dynamic new works using tools such as NVIDIA’s StyleGAN2, a generative AI software. The AI-generated visuals are manipulated again with the human touch via a second layer of software to create an unfurling cascade of surreal and immersive imagery. “I’m coming from the creative corner, not the pessimistic corner,” Anadol says. “Dataland is a place for contemplation on technology.”
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. On the docket: a $100,000 artist’s residency, a gallery devoted to demystifying artificial intelligence, and an AI-informed tasting experience from Valerie Confections. It’s a brave new world downtown. dataland.art.
Feature image: Installation view of Machine Dreams: Rainforest, at Dataland, June 20, 2026–January 31, 2027.
This story originally appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of C Magazine.
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