In 2026, a museum dedicated to AI art feels inevitable. And on June 20, one will open in Los Angeles. DATALAND—tag line: Where human imagination meets the creative potential of machines—was announced in the fall of 2024, and will open in the Grand LA, a mixed-use complex in downtown Los Angeles designed by Frank Gehry.
DATALAND was co-founded by Refik Anadol, the digital art pioneer who came to fame in 2022 thanks to his wildly popular generative art installation Underpervised in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art, and Efsun Erkılıç, a painter and art producer. Both artists are Turkish, but have lived and worked in LA for years; they co-founded Anadol’s studio in the city in 2014.
“LA is the center of creativity,” Anadol said in a statement. “It is a city that defines the future of art, music, cinema, architecture, and more, and we can’t wait to open DATALAND’s flagship location in our adopted home.”
The museum will include five gallery spaces that will cover 25,000 total square feet; an additional 10,000 square feet are set aside for the technologies and hardware required to run the type of cutting edge digital art that will be on view at DATALAND.
DATALAND’S first show, naturally, is a Refik Anadol Studio project. “Machine Dreams: Rainforest” will utilize artificial intelligence (in this case, a model trained on various ecological datasets) to “translate the intelligence of the natural world into interrelated sensory experiences.” The show will be on view through Jan. 31, 2027. There will even be a version of Anadol’s long-running Infinity Room, but instead of Kusama-style mirrored rooms filled with lights and spherical objects, DATALAND visitors will hear a 1987 recording of the now-extinct Hawaiian bird species and smell AI-generated scents.
There is no ticketing information available on the DATALAND website, just the option to sign up for presale information. Membership starts at $350/year.
