Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The artist shakes his head, Harry Potter-style glasses sliding off his round face as he points at a grove of psychedelic trees shifting on a massive screen — as if Philip K Dick had conjured a rainforest. But this isn’t science fiction.“It’s alive,” Refik Anadol beams.Leaves and vines flush an unreal green and purple, as they’re projected onto a white wall and white concrete floor. With a chunky step of the artist’s Timberland boots, the landscape reacts and the images change again. You might think this was some trippy pre-programmed screen saver, but “it’s making the system. It’s a living thing, a living painting,” explains the 39-year-old Istanbul-born artist.This panorama is constantly reinterpreting reams of information. Unlike the data fed into generative algorithms such as ChatGPT, these images aren’t simply scraped off the web. They were painstakingly collected after scanning the world’s largest rainforest with laser-mapping technology, which allowed Anadol to plot out in 3D what looks like the entire Amazon basin.Anadol has also partnered with the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to tap into half a billion images of flora, fungi and fauna. “This concept of using data from the forest to be reconstructed as a living painting-sculpture is a 10-plus year experiment.” That process allows his computers “to dream”, he says, as we watch the abstract light show.He calls it his “Large Nature Model” — and it will fill the inaugural exhibitions of his next great leap: an AI museum in Los Angeles. The 20,000 sq ft Dataland — powered by renewable energy — will open later this year with four gallery spaces and 30 ft ceilings perfect for projections that leverage Anadol’s data partnerships. Co-founded with his wife Efsun Erkiliç, it’s part of a sprawling Frank Gehry-designed complex called The Grand. With the expanding Broad museum next door, the hope is this will be a shot in the arm for LA’s downtown cultural corridor, still reeling after the pandemic. The key is “immersion and experience”, Anadol says, explaining a plan to deliver a museum that engages all the senses through digital sculptures like the one he’s just shown me. “The computer is the core,” with custom LEDs, sensors and cameras that all measure data, “and it can feel, it’s all a part of a system. A very complex system.”Alongside his swaying rainforest, sound and even scent will also be key, with AI-generated smells that reimagine everyday aromas. He lets me sniff for myself, leading me past 3D printers and a robot to a veritable parfumerie here in his sprawling 10,000 sq ft studio — an old glass factory — overlooking the Los Angeles river. These scents were trained on half a million scent molecules. “What do you think?” he asks, as I whiff an earthy blend that recalls a garden. “Heirloom tomatoes,” he reveals, when I can’t quite guess. “I want Dataland to be a place for learning,” he says. Also tapping all this data is Anadol’s Living Encyclopedia project, an extension of his Large Nature Model that he says is “like a Britannica” which lets users “ask questions and dream about anything and everything”. It uses what Anadol calls “a biome index” to generate images of real — and fantastical — species, based on text prompts.Anadol tells me of the 16-hour days he and his army of architects, designers and researchers have been working in preparation for Dataland’s launch. There’s no doubting his boyish optimism, despite the severe outfit (Anadol has worn head-to-toe black for the past 12 years — perhaps in homage to the sci-fi films, such as Blade Runner, that he loves.)And yet depending who you talk to, AI technology is either the holy grail or snake oil. “Ninety-nine point nine per cent of AI art isn’t art,” cautions Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Jerry Saltz when I put the question to him. “Pushing a button is a gimmick, not art.”For artists and collectors, there’s also a huge grey area about what is and isn’t legal, amid criticism over AI stealing original work. Anadol acknowledges those fears. But when it comes to his own art, “it’s just a medium, that’s what AI is. I can’t draw, but this is my canvas and my brush,” he says, picking up his keyboard. Anadol only uses original or licensed data — Dataland is committed to using “ethical AI”. Nothing is stolen. “These are original digital sculptures built with data.”Dataland’s location, opposite the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, is auspicious too. That hall is where Anadol shot to fame in 2018, using 42 projectors to map his “data sculptures” onto its steel walls.It’s an unlikely origin story. Just a few years after landing in the US and graduating from UCLA, emailing Gehry turned out to be Anadol’s big break. He told the fabled architect how much he admired him, sharing his dream to use his hall as a canvas. After Gehry gave his blessing, and Chad Smith, then the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s chief operating officer, agreed, a bushy-tailed Anadol went to work, tapping nearly 45 terabytes of digitised LA Phil archives (including 40,000 hours of recordings).“The art crowd, tech crowd, hipster crowd, they all came to watch. It was a turning point,” remembers Smith, now president and chief executive of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. “I wasn’t totally sure what we were getting and we came out of it saying this is the real thing. Here’s someone who is truly a futurist. He’s using this technology to create a new art form.”Next, the Museum of Modern Art fed Anadol 138,000 pieces spanning two centuries from its collection, and his computer spat out a massive installation in the museum’s lobby. Sotheby’s sold an NFT series made with two million space images for more than $5mn. Last year, Bill Gates put him on his Netflix show, What’s Next?.When we speak, Anadol is about to jet to Zürich for a new installation at the Kunsthaus Museum, then Davos for the World Economic Forum before dashing back to the Amazon. His climate-focused NFTs have raised $3mn for Brazil’s Yawanawá people, one of the tribes he credits with turning him on to the power of nature. “That was my life-changing experience in Amazonia,” Anadol says. “I even have a special name given by a tribe.” (Anadol won’t reveal that moniker — it’s too personal, he says.)“The work really speaks to people,” says Jeffrey Deitch, who tells me his gallery’s 2023 show with Anadol was the “highest attendance we’ve ever had. We had people waiting in line for hours in the rain to see his living paintings”. Maybe a plucky immigrant’s luck explains why Anadol can’t help himself when we meet, name-dropping celebrities and recent Silicon Valley visits, including “the ten podcasts I did today”. But it’s testament to the shared excitement around Anadol’s work. “LA is a place for experimentation and Refik’s got a wide open, excited audience,” says Meaghan Lloyd, chief of staff for Gehry Partners, who calls her boss a fan. “This is a first.”Dataland may not actually be the first AI museum, points out Audrey Kim, a tech exec who founded San Francisco’s Misalignment AI Museum in 2023. Either way, big projects like these “help demystify the topic”, Kim says. “There are so many implications for both amazing uses of AI and destructive and dangerous ones. The tech is evolving so rapidly that people aren’t aware and they should be.”That’s Anadol’s plan. “AI is just a tool,” he says, one that allows him to communicate ideas and experiences he couldn’t otherwise share with audiences. If this is the rise of the machines we’re all afraid of, maybe we’re overreacting, he chuckles.“Machines dominate our lives and I am trying to show the mind inside the machine,” he tells me. “That helps explain human consciousness. If that’s not art, what is art?” dataland.artFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
