DATALAND, the long-announced museum dedicated to AI-driven art and design from media artist Refik Anadol, has set its public opening for Spring 2026 in Downtown Los Angeles at The Grand LA, the mixed-use complex designed by Frank Gehry. The venue positions itself as a permanent home for “machine imagination,” bridging contemporary culture and computational creativity across several galleries.
What’s new: a reengineered “Infinity Room”
Anadol’s latest preview centers on the reimagined Infinity Room, a mirrored environment that dissolves corners and ceilings into an ever-shifting field of image and light. Unlike earlier iterations, the new installation layers in an olfactory dimension: AI‑generated scents derived from the studio’s Large Nature Model (LNM), plus next‑gen world models—AI systems that simulate the physics and spatial dynamics of a scene—to generate coherent, evolving environments in real time. The goal: move beyond representation into simulation, inviting visitors to step inside a machine‑imagined world.
Why it matters
For museums, AI is no longer a speculative accessory—it’s becoming a toolset for storytelling, conservation, and audience engagement. DATALAND aims to be a dedicated laboratory for these possibilities, showcasing how data sets—from climate archives to natural history collections—can be transformed into immersive “data paintings,” “data sculptures,” and generative environments. In practice, that means visuals shaped by vast ecological and scientific corpora, scents mapped from molecular datasets, and soundscapes responding to live inputs.
The building blocks
- Large Nature Model (LNM): a long‑running Anadol Studio research initiative trained on extensive biodiversity and environmental data, which underpins several DATALAND experiences (including the scent system).
- World Models: AI that “understands” spatial and physical dynamics, used to make the Infinity Room’s illusions feel coherent—as if the gallery itself has a memory of wind, light, and motion.
- Location & scale: Situated within The Grand LA, the museum is planned as a multi‑gallery venue designed for constantly evolving installations and research-led residencies.
Timeline shift—and what to expect at opening
DATALAND’s debut was first floated for 2025; the team now targets Spring 2026, citing the increased technical scope of its launch galleries. Early reporting points to five discrete galleries and a footprint around the mid‑tens of thousands of square feet, with the Infinity Room slated as one of the opening centerpieces. Expect a blend of signature Anadol experiences—high‑resolution, room‑scale projections—with new layers of scent and simulation built from custom AI research.
How this fits the wider museum conversation
Across the sector, cultural leaders are weighing AI’s upside (access, interpretation, new forms of scholarship) against legitimate concerns (ethics, dataset provenance, energy). With DATALAND, Anadol is betting that a transparent, research‑forward platform—one that foregrounds how the models are trained and where the data comes from—can help audiences grasp both the potential and the tradeoffs. It’s an experiment in infrastructure as much as exhibition design.
