A new experimental exhibition may change your mind about artificial intelligence art

“I think we are “We are literally in a renaissance phase,” says artist Refik Anadolu, in a characteristically optimistic comment, when asked how he sees this moment in art history, with the rise of yet controversial artificial intelligence as a medium. “We are literally in a renaissance phase. We don’t have a name for it yet.”

Anatolia, known for its technology installations that explore the relationship between humans and machines, has reasons to be happy. On June 20, Dataland, the cutting-edge gallery in downtown Los Angeles that he co-founded with his studio partner Efsun Erkılıç, opened its doors to an eager public. Billed as the world’s first “AI art museum,” it welcomed more than 10,000 visitors to its inaugural exhibition in the first two weeks, Anadol told WIRED.

Courtesy of Dataland

The set piece is his most ambitious to date, an immersive architectural vision titled Machine Dreams: Rainforest. The interactive digital displays, which respond directly to visitors’ movements and biometric data (tracked by wearable devices), produce ever-changing images and audio clips drawn from the Anadole Large Nature Model, an artificial intelligence system created using natural science archives from prestigious research institutions such as the Smithsonian.

“Over the course of three years, we started from scratch and trained our own AI models, working with our own datasets,” Anadolu says. He and his team traveled to the Amazon and other rainforests to capture raw materials that would fuel the model’s hallucinogenic versions of those environments. “We have the equivalent of 5 petabytes of raw data that we collected ourselves,” Anadolu says. He’s proud that Dataland made sure to obtain this treasure with the approval and participation of researchers, while major Silicon Valley AI companies have faced backlash and lawsuits over what many creators say is unlicensed and extractive use of their content as training data.

Anadol adds that Google DeepMind gave Dataland access to “experimental, low-power” resources, allowing the gallery to run on Google Cloud and maintain “sustainable computing.” (Anadol has collaborated with the tech giant since it became the first person to receive the Google Artists and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency in 2016.)

Ethics, environmental responsibility, and a dedicated effort to produce what feels like a living, breathing ecosystem using AI: these commitments are crucial if Anadol and DataLand are to redefine “AI art.” This statement in itself is unacceptable to many creators and critics of the generative “decline” that has swept through visual media at every level. Anatolia is fully aware that people reject these things, and he rarely blames them. “I mean the majority are 100 percent right,” he says, noting that when someone hears about AI art, “their first assumption is like quick engineering, or a bunch of eight-second clips.”