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In DATALAND, Refik Anadol Has Built a Museum That Learns From Its Audience

"It's a new way of telling a story. The audience becomes a reflection. The character can feel the emotions of the audience. We are experimenting with something never done before."

The concept of a museum originated with cabinets of curiosities in the 16th century, rooms that contained anything from shrunken heads to narwhal tusks, reflecting the interests of their owners. When collections overflowed into other rooms, they were referred to as galleries, and a series of galleries, a museum. The world’s first public art museum, Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, dates to 1661, originated with the Amerbach Cabinet, a private collection that included works by Hans Holbein the Younger.

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But what if the art on display doesn’t fit in a frame or on a pedestal? What if it swims across the walls, floor and ceiling, and is ever changing? What if its delivery system is a series of projectors, and it’s as ephemeral as a memory? Such questions might be posed by some visitors at the world’s first A.I. museum, DATALAND, recently opened in L.A., the brainchild of Refik Anadol, generally regarded as the world’s first A.I. artist, or at least its most prominent.

DATALAND occupies a Frank Gehry-designed space on Grand Avenue, across the street from the late great architect’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, and covers about 35,000 square feet, 10,000 of which houses servers that generate the art. Upon entry, visitors descend an escalator to a massive space, the Data Pavilion, 720 million pixels swimming with imagery inspired by the Yawanawá rainforest of the Amazon.

Composed of an algorithmic 12 chapters, each one focuses on different data subject to artistic experimentation, what Anadol calls “a living sculpture,” abstract patterns of biomes—flora, fungi, trees and finally rain. “People can feel the........

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