A renowned AI artist has announced that he will open the world’s first AI museum in Los Angeles, which will focus on “the intersection of human imagination and machine ingenuity.”
The artificial intelligence art museum, called Dataland, is scheduled to open in late 2025 in a new development next to the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Broad Museum and the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, creating a space for AI art among Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions.
Dataland co-founder Refik Anadolu, 38, is a media artist whose “crowd-pleasing yet controversial” works using artificial intelligence have been exhibited around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Serpentine Art Museum and, most recently, the United Nations Headquarters.
Over the past two years, Anadolu has been at the center of a debate over the value of AI-generated art, with audiences reportedly “glued” to his giant interactive digital canvases while some art critics slammed the work as overvalued and mediocre.
Now, Anadolu aims to create a permanent exhibition space for artists like himself among Los Angeles’ most prominent high culture venues, and the AI museum promises to promote “ethical AI” and use renewable energy sources.
“Los Angeles, and California, is the perfect place to imagine a new world,” Anadol said. A longtime fan of the film “Blade Runner,” Anadol dismissed the idea that there might be anything dystopian about founding an AI museum in the heart of Los Angeles. “This museum is utopian,” he said.
Anadolu said that through Dataland, he and his small team of artists and technologists hope to reinvent the museum for the age of artificial intelligence, highlighting the innovative work of digital artists who have long been viewed with skepticism by the traditional art world, as well as providing a space for ongoing scientific and technological research.
Refik Anadol. Photo: Dustin Downing
He said the building itself will be equipped with “cloud computing and special sensors and special activities” to create a new high-tech physical museum space.
While Anadolu, who has worked with Google, Nvidia and other industry giants, hopes to use the new museum to demystify AI, he also says the technology’s potential is enormous.
“AI is not a tool. AI is more than a tool,” he said. “Literally never in the history of humanity has intelligence as a technology existed.”
Los Angeles may be one of the cities where cultural workers are most hostile towards artificial intelligence, following a historic double strike in Hollywood last year, when both writers and actors took to the picket line over concerns that AI would replace human artists.
Anadolu said he shared some of the concerns of Hollywood artists and that some of their criticisms of the AI economy were “validated.”
“I don’t think machines should be the only creators. It’s a scary future to have only machines doing creative work,” he said.
Anadol said he believes it’s important for artists to build their own artificial intelligence tools, and not simply use tools built by others. “I collect my own data and train my own models,” he said. “I’m literally co-creating with the machine every step of the way.”
Anadolu said the museum will place an emphasis on “ethically collected” datasets such as the Large Nature Model, an open-source generative AI tool built using data shared by the Smithsonian, the British Museum of Natural History and other prominent institutions.
And as the AI industry faces intense scrutiny for its massive energy demands, Anadolu said the museum aims to be transparent about the energy use behind the museum’s new tools and technology. He said the museum has worked with Google to find a sustainable energy park in Oregon to power its AI tools without fossil fuels, even if it will slow down the process.
“The idea here is not to be fast or first, but to be right,” Anadolu said.
The AI Art Museum will start as a for-profit business, but Anadolu said the new venture is also considering going in a non-profit direction if it can secure the backers that would make it possible.
“AI art is a very new art form. It’s barely been explored. It’s just starting,” he said.
Not yet 40 and already exhibiting his work all over the world, Anadol is a man on the move – sometimes literally on the move, as he told The Guardian from inside a taxi driving through New York City on the day of the United Nations General Assembly.
Last year, New York’s Museum of Modern Art purchased Anadolu’s “Unsupervised,” a giant digital canvas that uses artificial intelligence to generate new, constantly changing displays based on 200 years’ worth of images from Moma’s own collection. Anadolu said it was the first generative AI work acquired by Moma.
Anadolu, who teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles’ School of Design, has extensive connections in the Los Angeles art and museum worlds. His work is featured prominently in the Getty Museum’s current Southern California art festival, PST: Art, and in a recent interview ahead of the museum’s opening announcement, Getty President and CEO Kathryn Fleming called him “probably the most well-known AI artist in Los Angeles.”
