The world's first museum dedicated to artificial intelligence is set to open this year. Dataland—as the museum founded by media artist Refik Anadol and artist Efsun Erkılıç will be called—is a completely new structure on the cultural scene, with an exhibition program that departs from traditional museology to explore an art form that has very little to do with tradition: a fusion of human creativity and machine learning.

At the heart of the inaugural exhibition will be the Large Nature Model, a generative artificial intelligence project developed by Anadol's studio. It is the first open-source AI model trained solely on environmental data collected using advanced technologies such as lidar, photogrammetry, immersive audio, and ultra-high-resolution images taken in 16 unique locations in the rainforest.

With architectural design by Studio Gensler and engineering consulting by Arup, Dataland will be built—with an estimated area of approximately 20,000 square meters—within The Grand LA, the large mixed-use complex designed by Frank Gehry and scheduled to open in 2022 in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. The Grand LA already houses luxury residences, hotels, retail, and cultural spaces, and is located near icons such as the Moca, The Broad, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall (also designed by Gehry).

For those familiar with Refik Anadol's work, the choice of location for what is his most monumental project to date seems more than coincidental. This is not the first time that the Turkish-American artist has engaged with the legacy of the architect who symbolized the rebirth of Los Angeles: with Living Architecture, on display at the Guggenheim in Bilbao until October 19, Anadol transformed part of the building into a gigantic “artificial hallucination” – a moving and irreverent tribute to 63 years of Gehry's designs, created using data mining.

“L.A. has long been a city that looks to the future in art, music, cinema, architecture, and more, and it feels natural to open Dataland here. 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 realization of one of my biggest dreams. To do so in a building designed by one of my heroes, Frank Gehry, is almost unbelievable.”, the artist said at the announcement of the opening of Dataland, explaining how his interest in large-scale, changing art stems precisely from Gehry's architecture.