Dataland opens June 20 in LA

Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç said Dataland will open on June 20 at The Grand LA, adding a museum devoted to AI arts to downtown Los Angeles’ Grand Avenue corridor. (dataland.art) (artnet.com) The museum’s flagship site includes five galleries across 25,000 square feet of public space, plus another 10,000 square feet for the computing systems that run the installations. (blooloop.com) (forbes.com) Its first exhibition, “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” opens the same day and is scheduled to run through January 31, 2027. The show uses environmental data, birdsong, plant records and weather inputs to generate shifting visuals across all five galleries. (dataland.art) (artnet.com) (blooloop.com) AI art here means software trained on large datasets that can generate new images and environments, rather than hanging a fixed painting on a wall. Dataland says its core system is a “Large Nature Model,” trained on permission-based nature data so the work can keep changing in real time. (dataland.art) (smithsonianmag.com) Anadol has said the model draws on material from institutions including the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Dataland and Anadol’s studio say the model also incorporates data collected from 16 rainforest environments around the world. (artnet.com) (blooloop.com) The opening matters beyond one exhibition because Los Angeles is in the middle of a museum-building surge, with Dataland joining the Broad, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Walt Disney Concert Hall on the same cultural strip. Artnet reported the project had originally been slated for late 2025. (artnet.com) (nprillinois.org) The museum is also arriving as artists and curators argue over whether machine-generated work borrows too heavily from training data, who counts as the author, and how much energy these systems consume. Smithsonian and NPR both framed the opening around those ethics and sustainability questions. (smithsonianmag.com) (kjzz.org) Anadol has answered those concerns by saying Dataland uses licensed or permission-based datasets and runs its model on a Google Cloud server in Oregon powered by 87 percent carbon-free energy. The museum says one visit uses about as much energy as charging a smartphone. (artnet.com) (blooloop.com) (kjzz.org) That leaves Dataland opening as both a new Los Angeles museum and a public test of whether AI art can win institutional space on the same footing as painting, sculpture and film. The doors open June 20. (artnews.com) (dataland.art)