Anadol is among the most commercially successful artists to center AI in their practice: he has sold over $30 million worth of NFTs—non-fungible tokens— donating a significant portion of the proceeds to charitable initiatives. In just the last year, he has had major exhibitions at Spain’s Guggenheim Bilbao, Dubai’s Museum of the Future, and the Kunsthaus Zürich in Switzerland. “When our work was collected by the Museum of Modern Art,” he says, “I realized we are in the art canon.”
Now embraced by the art world’s major institutions, Anadol is building his own. In Los Angeles, his Dataland—the “world’s first museum of AI arts”—is set to open later this year. In his view, many artists are limited not by a lack of ideas, but a lack of access to computational resources; the museum will offer residency and art collection programs to bridge this divide. “We need an institution like Dataland to really unlock creativity without being unequal,” he says. His hope is to “give this thinking brush to other artists.”
Seen by some as a technical pioneer, Anadol often works with partners like Nvidia, Samsung, and Google to make dazzling art accessible to millions, while offering an optimistic vision of human-machine collaboration. While some critics have argued that his work is aesthetically pleasing but uncritically celebrates a divisive technology, Anadol says that his work is about pushing the limits of the medium while evoking joy and hope. “Our work is absolutely not aesthetics only,” he says. “We always try to create societal impact.”