Refik Anadol's AI museum takes your pulse as an input
Every visitor at the Grand LA wears a wristband and a scent collar, and leaves holding a paper token of the data they generated, to keep or to destroy.
The detail that gives DATALAND away as a game is the ending. You walk out with a small paper token representing the data your visit generated, and you choose whether to keep it or destroy it. That is a save file, and a prompt asking whether you want to keep the save.
The museum opened on June 20 at the Grand LA, Frank Gehry’s complex downtown, and bills itself as the first museum of AI arts. Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, who founded Refik Anadol Studio together in 2014, have built something that behaves less like a gallery than like a running simulation. Each visitor wears a wrist device and a neckband that doubles as a scent diffuser, and the exhibition state shifts according to who is in the room, how they move, and what live ecological telemetry is arriving at that moment. The museum says the inaugural show, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, is drawing real-time signals from 16 rainforest locations (humidity, light, soil moisture) and running on the studio’s Large Nature Model, trained, it says, on permission-based data with the Smithsonian and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology among its partners.
The show runs through January 31, 2027.
When a museum starts behaving like a simulation, somebody should read it as one. We do that here, without the press-release voice.
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