DATALAND, the museum of AI arts, opens to the public Saturday, June 20, 2026

Co-founders Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç announce today that DATALAND, the world’s first Museum of AI Arts, opens to the public on June 20, 2026. Located at The Grand LA, the Frank Gehry-designed complex in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, DATALAND is the newest addition to the performing arts and cultural institutions that comprise the Grand Avenue Cultural District. Conceived as a living museum where architecture is no longer static, but part of an intelligent framework, DATALAND was built without compromise, utilizing the most advanced technologies available and redefining artistic expression in the age of machine intelligence.

“After a journey of many years, we are so excited to finally share DATALAND with the public, ” said Anadol. “LA is the center of creativity. 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.”

“Bringing DATALAND to life in Los Angeles is incredibly meaningful,” said Erkılıç. “With DATALAND, we are opening a space that brings together artists, scientists, and pioneers, and we invite the public to experience storytelling in a completely new way.”

Today Anadol and Erkılıç also reveal details of DATALAND’s inaugural exhibition Machine Dreams: Rainforest, created by Refik Anadol Studio. Years ago, Anadol traveled to the Amazon rainforest with Erkılıç, where an encounter with the environment shifted his understanding of nature. Surrounded by dense ecological systems operating in constant exchange, he began to see the forest as a vast, interconnected intelligence; one that transforms invisible forces such as light, moisture, and time into physical form. That experience became a lasting reference point for the Studio’s work and continues to inform its approach to data, perception, and artistic creation.

Machine Dreams: Rainforest unfolds across DATALAND’s five galleries as a narrative of a deepening relationship between machine intelligence and the natural world, and asks vital questions. If nature is an intelligence that translates invisible forces into form, what happens when a machine learns to speak its language? And can an AI trained on the memory of Earth generate not just imagery, but empathy for the natural world?

Machine Dreams: Rainforest is Anadol’s ambitious vision to translate the intelligence of the natural world into interrelated sensory experiences that bring audiences into direct, immediate contact with its complexity. Recognizing that not everyone can stand within a rainforest or encounter the vast symphony of its tens of millions of bird songs, Anadol turns to machine intelligence as a means of access, preservation, and amplification. Through advanced AI systems processing immense ecological datasets and biofeedback from the audiences in real time, the works generate an emergent, living reality, a machine’s dream shaped by continuous streams of environmental and biological data.

Within this evolving system, moments of recognition and interpretation emerge across different forms of knowledge: when Yawanawá leader Nixiwaka encountered one of the system’s generated forms, he identified it within his own cosmology and named it Ruwe Pinu — bringing an ancestral practice of naming forest presences into a computational context. At the same time, the exhibition registers loss as part of this expanded field of perception, most notably in the Infinity Room, where visitors encounter the 1987 recording of the last known Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, a now-extinct bird whose unanswered call becomes part of the work.

Subtle shifts within distant rainforest ecosystems reverberate within the architecture, influencing temperature, light, and visual form, creating a dynamic connection between geographies. This vision is grounded in the ancestral knowledge shared by the Yawanawá people, whose teachings, the story of Ruwe Pinu, and healing songs were entrusted to Anadol and Erkılıç, weaving a spiritual and cultural dimension into the computational fabric of Machine Dreams: Rainforest.

Anadol and Erkılıç’s relationship with the Yawanawá community began through immersive time in the Amazon rainforest, where experiences in the Sacred Village profoundly shaped Refik’s artistic direction. From this transformation emerged Winds of Yawanawá, a landmark generative AI blockchain collection comprising 1,000 unique Data Paintings that combined live weather data from the village with works by young Yawanawá artists, raising millions of dollars for the community. The project was presented globally at TED2023 in Vancouver and later, in 2024, at Art Basel Hong Kong, where Anadol and Erkılıç joined Hans Ulrich Obrist to discuss its implications for digital art and social impact. In January 2025, the collaboration reached a major milestone with the first Indigenous Conference held in the Sacred Village, bringing together representatives from 40 Indigenous nations and supported in part by proceeds of the collection, which also contributed to the establishment of the first Indigenous Museum in the Amazon. Most recently, at Art Basel Miami Beach, the final edition of Winds of Yawanawá sold for over $1 million, with proceeds dedicated to preserving 2.5 million acres of Amazon land and supporting 19 Indigenous tribes, reflecting a relationship that has developed from personal inspiration into meaningful collaboration.

Anadol’s experiences in the rainforest also sparked the creation of Refik Anadol Studio’s Large Nature Model (LNM), the AI model at the center of Machine Dreams: Rainforest. The LNM is the first open access, nature-based AI multi-modal trained on one of the world's largest datasets of the natural world. “The Yawanawá have spent generations reading the living language of the Amazon — the small, radiant presences that emerge from the forest when something important is about to happen, ” says Anadol. “The Large Nature Model has processed the memory of those same forests at a scale no human mind could hold. ”

Reflecting DATALAND’s commitment to permission-based data practices, the vast ecological archives from the land’s rainforests to the ocean’s coral reefs used to train the LNM were obtained through data partnerships with the Smithsonian, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Getty, iNaturalist, and London’s Natural History Museum. The model also incorporates data collected first-hand from 16 rainforest environments around the world.

To sustain the future of AI Arts, DATALAND honors the natural world it seeks to represent. Thus, the Large Nature Model (LNM) is hosted entirely on a specialized Google Cloud server in a low-CO2 compute zone in Oregon, running on 87% carbon-free, renewable energy. The energy required to generate a visitor’s stay is roughly equal to charging one smartphone. DATALAND’s commitment to sustainable infrastructure ensures that its digital ecosystems thrive without leaving a heavy footprint on the physical one.

Past Refik Anadol Studio presentations utilizing the Large Nature Model include Living Archive: Nature (World Economic Forum 2024, Davos), Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive (Serpentine Galleries, London; and Futura Seoul, Seoul), Large Nature Model: A Living Archive (NVIDIA GTC 2024, San Jose), Large Nature Model: Coral (United Nations Headquarters, New York), and Living Architecture — Biophilia (Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, Venice). The culmination is DATALAND’s inaugural exhibition, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, an ambitious redefinition of what art can be in the age of machine intelligence. Developed by Refik Anadol Studio’s collective of artists, scientists, architects, and engineers, the exhibition redefines the museum as a site of continuous production, where art is no longer presented as a finished object but unfolds in real time through the dynamic interplay of data, computation, and human presence.

Machine Dreams: Rainforest will be on view from Saturday, June 20, 2026 to Sunday, January 31, 2027, only at DATALAND.

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Today marks the opportunity to be among the first to experience DATALAND through its membership program. All members receive preview access to the museum before it opens to the public.

Pioneer Members receive additional pre-opening benefits, including an invitation to an exclusive preview event with Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, and a 1 of 1 unique generative print from Machine Dreams: Rainforest commemorating the opening of DATALAND.

Following opening, members enjoy ongoing benefits including recurring access to the museum, priority entry into the museum and its galleries, and preferred pricing for guests. Online offerings include access to members-only digital salons and to Living Encyclopedia, which allows visitors to interact with the Large Nature Model, AI systems and datasets powering the inaugural exhibition.

For more information about memberships visit: Sign up for the official DATALAND newsletter at dataland.art to gain insider access to ticket onsales, presales, special programs and more.

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About DATALAND:
DATALAND is the world’s first Museum of AI Arts and digital ecosystem where human imagination meets the creative potential of machines. DATALAND’s flagship Los Angeles location has five galleries across 25,000 square feet of public space with an additional 10,000 square feet of space that houses the museum’s advanced technologies. Situated at Frank Gehry’s The Grand LA, DATALAND unites pioneers across multidisciplinary fields including the arts, science, and technology under the artistic leadership of Refik Anadol Studio. Opening on June 20, 2026, DATALAND joins the renowned visual and performing arts institutions in the city’s Grand Avenue Cultural District including The Broad, LA Phil, MOCA, The Music Center, REDCAT, and The Colburn School. DATALAND’s mission includes serving as a public repository for large-scale nature-focused data sets, providing online access and learning platforms, and collecting and exhibiting artworks by digital and AI artists. In October 2025, DATALAND established an artist residency program in partnership with Google Arts & Culture to support creatives working with machine intelligence. DATALAND is designed in collaboration with award-winning architecture firm Gensler and global sustainable development consultancy Arup. Aspiring to set the global standard for the presentation, curation, and exploration of AI Arts, DATALAND embodies a new model for cultural institutions in the 21st Century.
Website: www.dataland.art; Socials: @datalandmuseum

About Refik Anadol Studio:
Established in 2014 by Refik Anadol, a pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence, and artist and entrepreneur Efsun Erkılıç, the Los Angeles-based Refik Anadol Studio produces enthralling and immersive media art intended for anyone, any age, and any background. The award-winning studio has been engaged by leading tech companies, groundbreaking researchers, and cutting-edge thought leaders to produce projects that have been shown in more than 80 cities spanning six continents, and experienced by millions of ardent fans. In taking the data that flows around us as the primary material and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol and his team paint with a thinking brush, offering us radical visualizations of our collective memories and expanding the possibilities of interdisciplinary arts. Refik Anadol Studio comprises artists, architects, data scientists, engineers and researchers from diverse professional and personal backgrounds, embracing principles of inclusion and equity throughout every stage of production. www.refikanadolstudio.com

About Refik Anadol:
Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is an internationally renowned media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. He is the Director and co-founder of Refik Anadol Studio in Los Angeles, the Artistic Director and co-founder of DATALAND, and teaches at UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts. Anadol’s site-specific data paintings and sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, public art, decentralized networks, and the creative potential of artificial intelligence. Anadol’s work has been exhibited at venues including MoMA, Guggenheim Bilbao, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Serpentine Galleries, National Gallery of Victoria, Venice Architecture Biennale, Hammer Museum, Arken Museum, Casa Batlló, Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Daejeon Museum of Art, and Istanbul Modern. Anadol has received a number of awards and prizes including TIME AI 100 Impact Award, UCLA’s 2024 Edward A. Dickinson Alumnus of the Year Award, the Lorenzo il Magnifico Lifetime Achievement Award for New Media Art, Microsoft Research’s Best Vision Award, Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Awards of Turkey, iF Gold Award, D&AD Pencil Award, German Design Award, UCLA Art+Architecture Moss Award, Columbia University’s Breakthrough in Storytelling Award, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Award, SEGD Global Design Award, LOOP Design Award and Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency Award. www.refikanadol.com

About Efsun Erkılıç:
Efsun Erkılıç (b. 1982, Istanbul, Turkey) is a visionary artist, producer, cultural researcher, and co-founder of Refik Anadol Studio and DATALAND. With a career spanning over a decade, Erkılıç has been the Executive Producer of multidisciplinary artworks at more than 80 venues worldwide, ensuring the seamless blend of human-machine collaborations and high-quality execution in every step of the Studio's interdisciplinary projects. Erkılıç is also an established painter. Her work captures an eclectic spectrum of colors and shapes, chronicling her myriad mystical, inner, and physical odysseys. Beyond her visual art, Erkılıç crafts performance pieces that meld bodily expression with philosophical insights into the human condition. She holds a BA in Visual Studies and an MA in Media Studies from Bilgi University, Istanbul.