Co-founders Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç have unveiled new details about DATALAND, the Museum of AI Arts.
Representing a paradigm shift in the museum experience, Anadol and Erkılıç introduced Data.Link, an intelligent system that connects art, architecture, and audiences through advanced AI systems, real-time data assimilation, integrated technologies, and wearable devices.
Through collaborations with NVIDIA, Google Cloud, founding olfactory partner L’Oréal Luxe, Epson, L-Acoustics, Empatica, LG Electronics, Gensler, ARUP, Scalable, Valerie Confections, and Constellation Immersive — a subsidiary of Creative Artists Agency (CAA) — DATALAND emerges as the world’s first omnisensory museum.
For 5,000 years, humans have been moved by works of art, but the relationship has always flowed in one direction. While developing DATALAND, we asked ourselves: ‘Is it possible for artworks to feel us too?’ We dreamed of a place where the audience and the artwork could merge, creating a collective emotional feedback loop. Thanks to collaborations with extraordinary innovators and technologies integrated directly into the architecture itself, that dream is now a reality, said Anadol.
“Collaborating across disciplines has always defined the way we think and create; it is inseparable from the way we exist”, stated Erkılıç. “Our practice emerges from the convergence of art, science, and technology: a collaboration of complex intelligences to build a collective memory rooted in shared knowledge. At DATALAND, we honour that complexity by highlighting the many minds, processes, and intelligences that have brought our vision to life over the years”.
The building as a medium
Designed in collaboration with the award-winning architecture and design firm Gensler and engineering consultancy Arup, with strategic support from Constellation Immersive, DATALAND was conceived as a new model for a 21st-century cultural institution. Aspiring to set the standard for how AI arts are presented, curated, and experienced, the museum seamlessly integrates advanced technologies into walls, ceilings, and floors, making the infrastructure disappear within the architecture and transforming the building itself into an active participant in the experience.
Through NVIDIA, DATALAND developed Connectome, a centralized high-performance computing system that functions as the museum’s neural hub, giving each installation the ability to process and respond in real time. Connectome orchestrates immense flows of information throughout the galleries, enabling each artwork to “dream” in direct dialogue with its environment. For DATALAND’s inaugural exhibition, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, the system integrates live ecological data from rainforests around the world, the Large Nature Model AI system, and biometric signals from visitors’ wearable devices, forming the computational foundation of the experience.
Created by Refik Anadol Studio, the Large Nature Model (LNM) is the first open-source multimodal AI model based on nature data. To support the future of AI arts, the LNM is hosted entirely on Google Cloud infrastructure in a low-carbon computing region in Oregon, operating on 87% carbon-free renewable energy. The LNM uses approximately the same amount of power as charging a smartphone to reinterpret the artwork for each visitor, reflecting DATALAND’s commitment to creating intelligent systems that expand artistic possibilities while minimizing environmental impact.
A touch that responds
DATALAND’s collaboration with Empatica allows visitors to connect directly with the building and artworks. Empatica’s FDA-approved EmbracePlus biosensor device incorporates visitors’ collective emotional reactions through real-time measurements of heart rate, skin temperature, and electrodermal activity. To achieve this, Empatica created a customized version of its medical technology exclusively for DATALAND, with adapted software and algorithms enabling real-time data transmission.
Data.Link translates these anonymous physiological signals captured by EmbracePlus, together with live environmental data, into a language that the Large Nature Model can interpret as emotion. The LNM responds by transforming what visitors experience: a machine dream that is not preprogrammed, but instead becomes a living dialogue between art and audience.
A touch that creates
Three transparent touchscreen displays from LG Electronics in the Latent Gallery invite visitors to create their own real-time artworks by leveraging the extensive knowledge of the Large Nature Model. In line with DATALAND’s mission to demystify AI arts, visitors can explore the vast datasets collected for the LNM — more than 500 million responsibly sourced images gathered through partners such as the Smithsonian, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Getty, iNaturalist, and the Natural History Museum in London.
Visitors will also be able to use the AI system to paint with what Anadol describes as a “thinking brush,” with results displayed in real time on a large media wall.
Seeing beyond the frame
Through collaborations with Epson, LG Electronics, and custom LED systems, DATALAND’s five galleries feature a combined total of 1.5 billion pixels. In the largest gallery, the Data Pavilion, eighty-four Epson 4K projectors generate more than 8 million pixels and 20,000 lumens each, operating in perfect synchronization through Scalable’s advanced algorithmic technology.
Using cameras to capture projected images and software that automatically aligns, blends, and colour-corrects every pixel, visible seams disappear and curved surfaces appear flawless. In the highly anticipated Infinity Room, visitors enter a three-dimensional LED cube whose walls, ceiling, and floor are completely covered with panels.
In total, DATALAND integrates 1,577 custom 10K panels covering approximately 325 square metres of LEDs, in addition to 28 LG displays distributed throughout the five galleries.
An olfactory journey through the rainforest
L’Oréal Luxe, DATALAND’s founding olfactory partner, has co-developed a pioneering scent experience inspired by the world’s rainforests. To achieve this, L’Oréal Luxe leveraged its proprietary fragrance model, enabling experts from L’Oréal Fragrance Métiers to co-create 12 avant-garde olfactory impressions.
Inspired creatively by the Large Nature Model and combined with the expertise and innovation of L’Oréal Luxe, these creations are not traditional perfumes but rather projective olfactory experiences. Among them is Scent of Data, blending clean musks and aldehydes to recreate the algorithmic pulse of code, effectively scenting the “mind” of the machine. Scent of Rain offers a hyper-realistic atmosphere of wet earth after rainfall, featuring a signature petrichor accord and earthy patchouli facets.
These fragrances will be revealed throughout the exhibition via aromatic wearable devices developed by DATALAND. This hardware allows each visitor to embark on an individualized journey that evolves as they move through the galleries. By releasing scents only for the wearer, the advanced diffusion technology ensures that fragrance molecules dissipate instantly without leaving residue on either the visitor or the surrounding environment.
The architecture of sound
Sound is elemental, immediate, and inseparable from the way we experience the world. DATALAND’s 250-speaker audio ecosystem is powered by the immersive L-ISA system from L-Acoustics.
L-ISA technology delivers a living soundtrack evolving in real time, woven from original music by composer and sound designer Kerim Karaoğlu, rainforest acoustic ecology, and sacred healing chants from the Yawanawá people.
L-Acoustics’ L-SMART technology monitors and optimizes energy consumption to achieve an average efficiency improvement of 30% without compromising sound quality. By dynamically suspending audio across a three-dimensional canvas — in front of visitors, above them, and fully surrounding them — DATALAND achieves an unprecedented level of spatial resolution for any permanent museum in the world.
The taste of data
In the Latent Gallery, DATALAND presents a revolutionary new medium for data sculpture: Data.Chocolate, an exclusive and limited-edition edible experience.
Developed in collaboration with Valerie Gordon of Valerie Confections, Data.Chocolate represents a unique dialogue between algorithmic data processing and human culinary intuition. The work translates machine-generated concepts — derived from vast datasets about cacao genetics and the Amazon rainforest — into an avant-garde four-piece tasting collection.
A building that learns and remembers
Anadol’s artistic practice has long explored the question: “If a building can learn, can it dream?” DATALAND’s inaugural exhibition, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, offers an affirmative answer.
It is an epic journey through five galleries that ambitiously redefines what art can become in the age of artificial intelligence. Developed by the collective of artists, scientists, architects, and engineers at Refik Anadol Studio, the exhibition reimagines the museum as a space of continuous production, where art is no longer presented as a finished object but unfolds in real time through the dynamic interaction between data, computation, and human presence.
Machine Dreams: Rainforest will be open from Saturday, June 20, 2026, through Sunday, January 31, 2027.
