It is a sunny and warm day in California outside, but upon entering Dataland, visitors are transported from the skyscraper-lined Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles directly into the Amazon rainforest and beyond, into an immersive fictional future where machines and the natural world come together. Dataland, by artist Refik Anadol, occupies over 25,000 square feet in Frank Gehry's Grand LA project, located directly across from the architect's Walt Disney Concert Hall, where Anadol exhibited one of his early data pieces in 2018. The Dataland experience is part science experiment, part highly revered art museum, and part immersive amusement park.
Anadol, a lifelong movie fan, is somewhat like Jurassic Park's John Hammond (played by Richard Attenborough), a mad scientist translating one of the most complex questions of our time — how we can use AI for human communication and deeper understanding — into a profound experience that asks visitors to use their imagination and is grounded in actual data.
Anadol believes artists have a role to play in conversations about AI, and Dataland is his contribution. "As a pioneering artist in this field for ten years, I felt we should take some kind of responsibility," he says. "This is a laboratory for imagination. We have walls, but no limits to thinking."
The museum uses over half a billion pixels to create rooms that reflect the natural world (using datasets from collaborations with the Smithsonian Institution, Getty, and others) and our bodies. A wristband technology package tracks visitors' heartbeats and physical reactions to the art and feeds them into the work itself. A loop hangs around attendees' necks, offering a rotating blend of 12 scents developed in collaboration with the L'Oreal Luxe fragrance team, triggered by live biometric data.
One of the opening exhibits at Dataland. Photo: Refik Anadol Studio; © 2026 Refik Anadol Studio/Dataland
By visiting the museum, Anadol ensures that as the images evolve and scents change and music shifts, visitors will capture every piece of the work that created a Disneyland for art and technology. Anadol's joy embodies something lost in many traditional museum experiences with new technology: a sense of delight.
This is not the only thing that sets Dataland apart from traditional museums. It is a for-profit institution, with ticket prices starting at $49. For Anadol, the effort and expense — for visitors and the museum itself — are part of turning the museum experience upside down. "For 5,000 years, we looked at artworks and felt something, right? The challenging question for me now is: 'Can the artwork feel us back?'"
His first attempt to answer this question is Machine Dreams: Rainforests, inspired by a visit to the Amazon, where Anadol met with Indigenous leaders of the Yawanawá community, largely isolated from modern technology. Among the opening experiences at Dataland, it is the most narrative-driven and uses Anadol's Large Nature Model to follow a story that came to him in a dream about a hummingbird in the forest, creating a middle ground between data and the artist's experience.
"This bird symbolizes focus and attention to nature," says Anadol, but "it also reminds us of real data from the real world and real memory of nature." He adds, "The tribe's leader allowed us to visualize this dream."
A Fragrant Experience
The Infinity Room exhibit relies more on visitors surrendering themselves to the possibilities of technology and suspending disbelief about how pixels and binaries can become waves of images. It will also be more familiar to visitors who already know Anadol's work, having appeared in some form in over 35 cities since its creation in 2015.
When the introduction begins, a scent reminiscent of a morning walk emanates — at least, that is what this writer smelled; other visitors may have a different experience. Every few minutes, a scent changes, and someone in the exhibition shouts: "Do you smell that?!"
Visitors explore one of the interactive exhibits at Dataland in Los Angeles. Photo: Refik Anadol Studio; © 2026 Refik Anadol Studio/Dataland
While the output from AI inputs and each person's experience will vary somewhat, the structure underlying the experience is steeped in art history as well as Anadol's influences in the Los Angeles art world and beyond. The first room is a large mirrored space with audiovisual elements that invite visitors to stay for at least 30 minutes. Many of the AI-based images deliberately reflect works by artists such as Dan Flavin, Yayoi Kusama, James Turrell, and others.
"I have great respect for [Kusama and] the Light and Space movement. [They're] all heroes," says Anadol.
Anadol and his partner in the studio, in the museum, and in life is artist and producer Efsun Erkiliç. Erkiliç likens the whole museum story to a way of visualizing the invisible. "The funny thing is that nature itself is magical," she says. "Not in the sense of an enchanted forest, but the forest itself is very magical. We just want to show that; you can still feel childhood emotions."
For all its data-driven personalization, Dataland is, more than anything, a unique post-COVID approach to collective storytelling and communal experience. In a departure from experiences designed for social media, like the Museum of Ice Cream (in several US cities, plus Singapore) or the countless immersive Van Gogh exhibitions, Dataland encourages visitors to put their phones away and become truly immersed and engaged.
Anadol hopes to see people using the space in unique ways. "I see people in meditation," he says. "I see people in flow states. I see people doing vibrational coding. I see people drawing the world."
Refik Anadol speaks during a preview event at Dataland in Los Angeles. Photo: Refik Anadol Studio; © 2026 Refik Anadol Studio/Dataland
While the museum does not easily lend itself to traditional displays of other artists' works, Anadol and Erkiliç's studio is launching a partnership with Google Art & Culture to open access to their AI models and create new works that can be shown at Dataland. They are working with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on much of the signature music and hope to bring more creators from the film and music worlds to create projects for the space, especially in the sanctuary area that collects data shared by visitors to build a unique data sculpture in real time. It is easy to imagine artists like David Byrne, Björk, Ryoji Ikeda, and others who blend music, imagery, and technology in their work having a field day here.
The Cutting Edge of a New Wave
Melissa Yonk, spokesperson for the Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board, sees Dataland as the vanguard of a wave of new technology- and storytelling-focused institutions and experiences opening in the city in the coming months. "Dataland is the center of this larger shift in the museum experience that we are seeing with [opening in September of the] Lucas Museum of Narrative Art," she says, also citing a new immersive experience at the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum and an expansion of the Meow Wolf interactive experience to the city.
Yonk says the opening of Dataland on June 20, along with the upcoming expansion of The Broad, is key to revitalizing Grand Avenue. "It's cementing downtown as an arts and culture hub, and that's how it started," she says. "It was a hub for film and the arts in the city, and it's had a different life since then."
Anadol says this vision is what his mentor Gehry, who died last December, would have wanted had he lived to see the museum and this part of Grand Avenue fully come to fruition. "He is one of the most important architects in human history," says Anadol. "He left these concrete shells for dreamers. And I think we are following that."
- Dataland, Los Angeles, opens to the public on June 20
