Co-founded by Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkiliç, Dataland will be a place where human creativity meets innovation, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary
The world’s first museum of AI arts is opening at The Grand LA, a Frank Gehry-designed destination for dining, hospitality and living in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Co-founded by Refik Anadol, a leader in AI-generated art, and Efsun Erkiliç, Anadol’s wife and fellow artist, the launch of Dataland will cement their ties to the city, which has long served as a source of inspiration and fascination for the couple. Their company, Refik Anadol Studio, currently celebrates its 10th year in Los Angeles, and has proven itself to be a pioneer in blockchain-based media art.
Situated across the street from Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, where, in 2018, the studio presented one of their most defining projects to date, Dataland will infuse the emerging art forms of tomorrow into a place of gathering and cultural ecology, pushing the boundaries of creativity, machine intelligence and human imagination. Entirely new audiences will be inspired to visit, infusing a different kind of energy into the neighbourhood and cementing Grand Avenue as a place to see and be seen in the international arts community.
The opening will be followed by a series of groundbreaking shows from Refik Anadol Studio, such as Living Paintings at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (Los Angeles), Living Architecture: Casa Batlló at Antoni Gaudí’s famed building (Barcelona), and Echoes of the Earth at the Serpentine Galleries (London). Those who visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York would also have seen Unsupervised, an “early masterpiece of AI-generated art” that was added to the museum’s permanent collection.
“Dataland is a place where human creativity meets innovation, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary,” says Erkiliç in a press statement. “[It] will be a place where audiences of all ages are transported to new worlds of discovery, inspiration and wonder. We are building a visionary museum that redefines learning and community, igniting the human spirit and fuelling a journey into the beauty of our collective memories—the world of data.”
