New AI museum brings rainforest sights, sounds, smells

Amazon sounds, wet earth scents, vivid colours immerse visitors in Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES:

Data collected from those visitors their movements, their heartbeats, and even the temperature of their skin -- will feed the computer that is creating the immersive display, using a network of sensors, including those on the wrists of ticket-holders.

"Machine Dreams: Rainforest" is the inaugural exhibition at Dataland, a new museum in the heart of America's second biggest city that is the brainchild of Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkilic, whose 10 million lines of code power the animations using 1.5 billion pixels.

Anadol said he was inspired by a visit to the Brazilian Amazon, a place he thinks everyone should experience.

"But I do not believe we should all go to the rainforest," he told AFP.

"The question was: can the rainforest come to us? Can we still connect, feel special, respect and love nature, learn about it?"

Wall-mounted sensors will track visitors' movements, and guests will wear a medical-grade, watch-like device to monitor their emotions and heart rate for interacting with the model. They will also carry a portable scent diffuser throughout the experience.

Using billions of images and datapoints, the model will create a constantly evolving experience.

It is as if the system were "dreaming," Erkilic explained.

"It's moving all the time, because it's gathering data. As soon as it builds one structure, it also affects the overall storytelling," he said.

"It's coming from a more poetic place instead of a scientific place. The machine itself is trying to recreate the reality based on the data points, it's like bringing all the little bits and dots and trying to build the reality itself."

At the end of the experience, visitors can sample chocolates with flavors generated by the model, or print T-shirts and paintings resulting from their interaction.

These are intended to serve as tangible souvenirs of the ephemeral dream in Dataland.

"The system forgets you; that is the beauty of it," says Anadol.

Dataland is a planned art museum dedicated to art created with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence, located in The Grand in Los Angeles. Originally it was planned to open in late 2025. It will now be opening on June 20, 2026, and is expected to be the first "museum of AI art". Its partnerships will include the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Smithsonian.

Dataland will be located near the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Broad and the home of the LA philharmonic. Turkish media artist Refik Anadol is a co-founder of the museum, and has pledged that the museum will promote "ethical AI" and will be powered by renewable energy. Anadol's studio has been recognized as a pioneer in using AI models to produce "AI data painting" and "data sculptures".

Dataland has been designed in collaboration with architecture firm Gensler and with consultancy Arup. It will span 20,000 square feet.

Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956, and the field went through multiple cycles of optimism throughout its history, followed by periods of disappointment and loss of funding, known as AI winters. Funding and interest increased substantially after 2012, when graphics processing units began being used to accelerate neural networks, and deep learning outperformed previous AI techniques. This growth accelerated further after 2017 with the transformer architecture. In the 2020s, an AI boom has coincided with advances in generative AI, which allowed for the creation and modification of media. In addition to AI safety and unintended consequences and harms from the use of AI, ethical concerns, AI's long-term effects, and potential existential risks have prompted discussions of AI regulation. AFP