Refik Anadol Studio Announces World’s First AI Art Museum

Refik Anadol b. 1985, Turkiye Follow +

A new museum devoted to generative art will open in Los Angeles next year.

Dataland comes from Refik Anadol Studio, which was co-founded in 2014 by AI artists and entrepreneurs Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkiliç. The museum will be located at The Grand L.A., a downtown development designed by starchitect Frank Gehry that’s near The Broad and MOCA Grand Avenue. Designed by the Gensler architectural firm, the 20,000-square foot museum will feature four gallery spaces.

Anadol said, ‘to have a permanent space for us to develop a new paradigm of what a museum can be, by fusing human imagination with machine intelligence and the most advanced technologies available, is a realisation of one of my biggest dreams. To do so in a building designed by one of my heroes, Frank Gehry, is almost unbelievable.’

While Anadol has presented his work at museums around the world to great success—including MoMA in New York and the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, having his own institution in which to present AI art allows him to bypass art world gatekeepers.

‘Yo, Jerry, open the gates!’ he exclaimed after I asked him about art critic Jerry Saltz’s dismissal of one of his works as a ‘narcotic pudding’.

‘Our studio has presented exhibitions in incredible places all around the world, but having a space of our own gives us a blank canvas to work with, allowing us to truly push ourselves to dream without boundaries,’ Erkılıç said.

Running their own museum is also a potentially lucrative model, as evidenced by the success of digital art collective teamLab‘s many locations.

Dataland’s inaugural exhibitions will draw on Refik Anadol Studio’s Large Nature Model, the world’s first open-source AI model based solely on nature data. The model draws from millions of specimen records and images—of coral, flowers, birds, and so on—held by the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, among others.

The date of the museum’s grand opening is yet to be announced. —[O]

Main image: The Grand LA reimagined in Refik Anadol Studio's data style for the launch of Dataland. Courtesy: Refik Anadol Studio.