World's first permanent museum for AI art is a mind-bending and polarizing concept that fascinates me

Dataland will be a "living museum made of pixels and voxels"

News By Timothy Coleman published 5 October 2024

There are plans to open the world's first permanent museum for AI art next year. Dataland, which is the brainchild of new media artist Refik Anadol, will be a 20,000 square-foot space that sits alongside galleries such as MOCA in the famed Frank Gehry-designed Grand L.A development, a culture hotspot in Los Angeles, California.

Anadol describes Dataland, which will host digital artworks and installations expressed through its own Large Nature Model (LNM), as a place "where human imagination meets the creative potential of machines".

Refik Anadol Studio's Large Nature Model is the world's first open source AI model based solely on nature data. The model is trained on data secured by permission from partners, including millions of specimens, objects, images and sounds from the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, in addition to another half a billion images of nature.

The resulting multi-dimensional data visualization installations are mesmerizing and immersive, a "living museum made of pixels and voxels". You can see an example below.

Not only is the Large Nature Model's data ethically collected (as opposed to scraping data without permission, which is the approach of many AI image generators), but it is run on Google servers in Oregon that only use renewable energy, leading Anadol to label his model 'ethical AI'.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Anadol says, “We are blending Gehry’s building with AI’s infrastructure and technology, and this never-seen-before art form”. He also explains that he is still working out what to call this new art form. It's "not AR, not VR, not XR... the best name so far, and people love it, is generative reality.”

So is GR the future of art?

Get daily insight, inspiration and deals in your inbox

Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more.

Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsReceive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors