DATALAND—the world's first Museum of AI Arts—opens in Los Angeles on 20 June 2026, with its inaugural exhibition Machine Dreams: Rainforest on view through 31 January 2027.
Machine Dreams: Rainforest is the inaugural exhibition of DATALAND, the Museum of AI Arts, situated at Frank Gehry's The Grand LA in Los Angeles. Developed by Refik Anadol Studio, the exhibition unfolds across five galleries and 25,000 square feet of public space, redefining the museum as a site of continuous production where art is no longer a finished object but emerges in real time through the interplay of data, computation, and human presence.
At the heart of the exhibition is the Large Nature Model (LNM), the world's first open-access multimodal AI trained solely on nature data, drawing on over 500 million images responsibly sourced from institutions including the Smithsonian, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Getty, iNaturalist, and London's Natural History Museum. The LNM is hosted on Google Cloud infrastructure in Oregon, operating on 87 percent carbon-free renewable energy.
Powering the entire museum is Connectome, a centralised high-performance computing system developed with NVIDIA, which allows each installation to process and respond in real time. The system integrates live ecological data from rainforests around the world with biosensing input from visitors' wearable devices by Empatica—translating anonymised physiological signals into a language the LNM interprets as emotion, creating a living dialogue between artwork and audience.
Across its five galleries, DATALAND features a combined 1.5 billion pixels—including 84 Epson 4K projectors in the Data Pavilion and 1,577 custom 10K LED panels totalling 3,500 square feet, alongside 28 LG displays. An Infinity Room encloses visitors in a three-dimensional LED cube covering all four walls, ceiling, and floor. Sound is delivered through a 250-speaker ecosystem driven by L-ISA immersive technology from L-Acoustics, combining original music by Kerim Karaoğlu with the acoustic ecology of the rainforest.
Founding Olfactory Partner L'Oréal Luxe contributes 12 avant-garde olfactive imprints distributed through individual wearable scent devices, creating a journey through the rainforest that evolves as visitors move between galleries. In the Latent Gallery, three LG transparent touch screen displays invite visitors to create their own work using the LNM, while Data.Chocolate—a four-piece edible artwork by Valerie Confections—extends the exhibition into the domain of taste.
"For 5000 years humans have been emotionally moved by artworks, but the relationship has always flowed in one direction. While developing DATALAND we asked ourselves, 'Is it possible for artworks to feel us back?'"—Refik Anadol
