\u201cThis is crazy,\u201d one of the students said under his breath.<\/p>\n
\u201cReally crazy,\u201d the guy next to him muttered. \u201cCrazy\u201d being an extreme form of \u201cawesome.\u201d<\/p>\n
We were in downtown Los Angeles at Dataland, the soon-to-open museum dedicated to art generated by artificial intelligence, and yeah, it was pretty crazy. The students, from an A.I. class at the University of California, Los Angeles, were getting an advance look at the invitation of their professor, the digital art star Refik Anadol<\/a>.<\/p>\n Founded by Anadol and his wife, the painter Efsun Erkili\u00e7<\/a>, Dataland is a highly anticipated addition to the city\u2019s burgeoning art\/tech scene \u2014 and arguably the most ambitious museum for A.I. art to date. But for now Anadol\u2019s 20-odd students and I were the only visitors in a vast, black-walled, 22-foot-high gallery awash in light, color and sound.<\/p>\n One moment, brightly colored photographs of flora and fauna from Brazil\u2019s Amazon were sliding down the wall and across the floor; then, similar photos drifted toward us in 3-D before abruptly speeding up and slowing back down; strips and circles of white light appeared in intricate patterns; abstract streaks of green and yellow, red and yellow splashed across the room.<\/p>\n \u201cBeautiful patterns from butterfly wings,\u201d Anadol explained.<\/p>\n Butterfly wings? Well, yes. The A.I. that he and his studio have built for the new museum is transforming data about rainforest butterflies into the constantly moving imagery his students call \u201ccrazy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cData is not just a number,\u201d Anadol pointed out. It used to be, but with the information explosion that began in the 1960s, almost anything can be considered data \u2014 photographs, video, audio, even butterfly wings. Anadol\u2019s data on butterflies \u2014 their origins, their life spans, their color patterns, their behavior \u2014 comes mainly from The Encyclopedia of Life<\/a>, an online repository compiled by the National Museum of Natural History.<\/p>\n Using this information, Anadol said, \u201cWe were able to model algorithmically how butterflies move.\u201d By feeding this into the extraordinarily sophisticated software that powers Dataland itself, and the artificial intelligence that makes it work \u2014 software that Anadol said is made up of more 10 million lines of code \u2014 he ends up with a hyperkinetic work of art.<\/p>\n Anadol started to make a name for himself a decade ago with much smaller, meditative displays of abstract patterns \u2014 waves of color surging across a screen, their eddies and swirls reflecting weather data and other phenomena. His breakthrough came in 2018 with a commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic<\/a> to project its newly digitized archives \u2014 every performance of every symphony, every trumpet, every oboe, every note the orchestra ever played \u2014 onto the billowing steel roof of its Frank Gehry-designed home, the Walt Disney Concert Hall.<\/p>\n No longer baby-faced at 40, but still irrepressibly bubbly and clad all in black, Anadol rarely stands still. His work has been all but ubiquitous on the museum circuit: the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Serpentine Galleries in London, the Hammer Museum at U.C.L.A. and others in Spain, France, Belgium, South Korea and his native Turkey. But his first big museum commission, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, left him enmeshed in controversy.<\/p>\n \u201cUnsupervised,\u201d his 2022-23 installation in MoMA\u2019s lobby, was so popular that it was held over for nearly a year. Museum-goers, and their kids, were transfixed by the ever-changing display of fluid dynamics that played out on its 24-by-24-foot screen. In The Washington Post, Sebastian Smee declared it \u201can early masterpiece of A.I.-generated art.\u201d<\/a> Other critics were not so impressed. Writing in The New York Times, Travis Diehl concluded that it was \u201conly a screen saver.\u201d<\/a> In New York magazine, Jerry Saltz dismissed it as \u201ca massive techno lava lamp\u201d<\/a> that offered \u201cpsychedelic slush and bacterial blobs.\u201d<\/p>\n If blobs aren\u2019t your thing, Anadol can make an easy target. Yet \u201cUnsupervised\u201d<\/a> has joined MoMA\u2019s permanent collection<\/a>, a gift from three of Anadol\u2019s collectors.<\/p>\n And the brickbats have landed him \u2014 and Dataland \u2014 squarely in the center of the art world\u2019s digital divide. On one side are several prominent critics; on the other, leading museum curators and directors. \u201cThere\u2019s not going to be a future in which this kind of work is not happening,\u201d Michael Govan, who heads the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s like Marcel Duchamp \u2014 if you know what\u2019s behind it, you\u2019re open to understanding it.\u201d And if you don\u2019t, you aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n WITH \u201cUNSUPERVISED,\u201d IT <\/strong>may have been unclear whether Anadol had lost the plot or his critics just couldn\u2019t find it. Dataland\u2019s inaugural exhibition, \u201cMachine Dreams: Rainforest,\u201d puts the story front and center.<\/p>\n Five years ago, Erkili\u00e7 urged him to come with her to the Amazon for inspiration. After a trek that involved planes, cars and 10 hours in a motorized canoe, they ended up among the Yawanaw\u00e1, an Indigenous people whose main contact with the outside world comes through Starlink<\/a> and WhatsApp. Anadol and Erkili\u00e7 were welcomed with sacred music, sacred dance and ayahuasca, a sacred hallucinogenic brew. Soon Anadol was collaborating with his new friends on \u201cWinds of the Yawanaw\u00e1,\u201d<\/a> a data-driven artwork whose 2023 unveiling in Greece was accompanied by a sale of 1,000 NFTs to benefit the tribe.<\/p>\n \u201cI was so inspired,\u201d he recalled. \u201cThe Yawanaw\u00e1 people, how they live in the forest \u2014 I just can\u2019t forget that feeling. But of course, we should not go to the rainforest every single day. The question was, can it come to us?\u201d<\/p>\n In Dataland, some version of it does. The centerpiece of \u201cMachine Dreams: Rainforest\u201d is its Infinity Room \u2014 a large cube in which an eight-minute, A.I.-generated film plays continuously on the walls, reflected by a mirrored floor and ceiling. The film features a glass hummingbird and a \u201cwisdom tree\u201d that\u2019s modeled on one in the Amazon.<\/p>\n \u201cI was seeing this glass hummingbird in my dreams,\u201d Anadol said. \u201cI asked the chief, why am I seeing this bird? He said this is a special bird that can only sing in the forest when it\u2019s flying to take the last breath of the wisdom tree.\u201d In the Infinity Room, you zoom in on its eye and enter a fantastical dreamscape of flowers, pipes and data. \u201cAlgorithmic folklore,\u201d Anadol called it. \u201cSome form of new storytelling.\u201d<\/p>\n Butterflies, birds, fireflies, every type of tree in the Amazon \u2014 the data that goes into \u201cMachine Dreams: Rainforest\u201d has been collected by Anadol himself in the field or by the team of artists, scientists, architects and engineers in his lab, Refik Anadol Studio, through partnerships with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Natural History Museum in London and other such outfits.<\/p>\n A lot of data will be collected from the visitors themselves. Lidar sensors in the walls calibrate your movements. The electronic bracelet you get when you enter is a medical-grade device that monitors your heartbeat and galvanic skin response \u2014 are you excited, calm, enjoying yourself, getting goose bumps? \u2014 and feeds them into Dataland\u2019s computer systems, allowing the displays to respond in real time. A.I., with human intervention, is used to generate Dataland\u2019s scents, created in partnership with L\u2019Or\u00e9al\u2019s Luxe division, and its tastes \u2014 chocolates created with a local partner, Valerie Confections. \u201cWe can look at a Rothko and feel incredible emotions,\u201d Anadol said, \u201cbut that artwork will never feel us back.\u201d Unlike the artworks in Dataland.<\/p>\n The data that Dataland collects will be deleted unless you ask for it as you leave. Even so, this spurred an awkward memory. When I was a little kid, I used to wonder as I was watching TV if the TV was watching me back. Now that I\u2019m all grown up, I don\u2019t feel any better knowing that these days, it actually can. But in Anadol\u2019s universe this is no paranoid fantasy; it\u2019s a marvel, like much else in his eyes.<\/p>\n ONE MORNING AT REFIK ANADOL STUDIO<\/strong>, the font of all this gee-whizzery, Erkili\u00e7 and I went for a walk. The studio occupies most of a former window factory in the Frogtown district of Los Angeles, between the I-5 freeway and the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River. We took an asphalt path along the riverbank past a motley collection of buildings. Railroad tracks on the other side carried lumbering freight trains. A flyer on a telephone pole read, \u201cMISSING: Have you seen my robot?\u201d All around us we saw nature trampled. I could see the appeal of the rainforest.<\/p>\n If its opening exhibition was inspired by their trip to the Amazon, Dataland itself is a product of the pandemic. Normal life suddenly stopped. The hiking trails were closed. Even the beaches were closed. There was much chatter about the metaverse, a full-on digital world you could have access to through a virtual reality headset.<\/p>\n \u201cBut we were thinking, nobody\u2019s going to ditch their physical life and move into the digital space,\u201d Erkili\u00e7 said. \u201cIt\u2019s not going to happen. We need to find something to bridge the digital and the physical. That\u2019s how Dataland was born.\u201d<\/p>\n Dataland is a for-profit institution. Anadol came up with the idea when they were on vacation in Mexico, after their initial rainforest trek. Then they thought up a name \u2014 but that was all they had. \u201cI\u2019m a realist,\u201d Erkili\u00e7 said. \u201cHe\u2019s a dreamer. He was communicating the dream to me, and my mind was like, how can we realize this?\u201d They would need money \u2014 a lot of it. Then things started to fall into place.<\/p>\n