AI Gets Its Own Museum: Refik Anadol’s Dataland

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Refik Anadol, the visionary Turkish artist who captivated millions with his ground-breaking MoMA installation Unsupervised, is now shaping the future of art and technology with the opening of the world’s first AI art museum, Dataland, in Los Angeles in 2025.

Recently recognized at the prestigious 2025 TIME100 Impact Awards, Anadol has spent nearly two decades pushing the boundaries of art and technology, transforming raw data and artificial intelligence into immersive, multisensory experiences. “This is a human-first endeavor,” Anadol explains in this exclusive interview, emphasizing his belief in the power of AI as a partner, not a replacement, in the creative process.

You garnered global attention and made headlines with your monumental work Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations at MoMA and you are about to make history by opening the world’s first AI art museum. What inspired you to create Dataland? What do you hope it will bring to the broader art and technology landscapes?

First of all, I’m so excited to share, especially as an artist practicing with data since 2008 and working with AI for almost a decade, I feel like it was this wonderful moment that finally the many technologies that we have been using as humanity started to converge. The art world remarkably may take time to observe, embrace, and understand these new technologies, but as an artist, working with data and AI, to me, it was just a very natural response to the life-changing landscape of humanity. Our MoMA show received 3 million people who spent an average of 38 minutes of experience. My partner Efsun and I thought about how we can push this medium forward to a place where we can contribute by understanding, presenting, exhibiting, collecting, and educating this specific medium. So I’ve been a teacher for the last 10 years at UCLA, and I have been in education as a professor, as a teacher, and as a still student. I feel that it’s very important to talk about AI to the world and explain this technology.

So we not only just talk, but we also create our own AI models, such as the large nature model, which was at the UN recently, the World Economic Forum, and many other places. We thought that we could create this very exciting platform and environment for anyone and everyone, and we will open the first location in Los Angeles, California next year. So it took us two years to design, imagine, create infrastructure, and create the AI that the museum needs.

It’s a lot of amazing work, but I’m so excited that this will be one of the first in the world that people will be able to see and feel the dreams of AI.

Where and when exactly will it open?

In downtown Los Angeles, in the Frank Gehry building next to Walt Disney Concert Hall, which is a cultural corridor where we have the MOCA Museum, Broad Museum, Disney Hall, and Data-land. The city of Los Angeles is supporting us, and incredible local artists, and many people in the tech industry, the entertainment industry. We have wonderful partners. We are hoping for Q3. I will share more about that as soon as April.

How will the world’s first AI art museum, push the boundaries of traditional art spaces and change how people connect with digital art?

So, the best way to explain this, is if you look at our former exhibits in Casa Batlló, Gaudí’s building, it is immersive. I’ve been preparing this mindset for 16 years. So the idea of data becomes a pigment, but this data is not just numbers, it’s a form of memory that can take any shape, any form, and light and data, and AI becomes a material that we can project and reconstruct, build environments. I’ve been awaiting these experiments and doing this for many years. I feel that people will truly be immersed in something extraordinary, something emotional, and something human first. So my work is all about “human first”.

So I don’t believe that feature with just machine does the creative thing we do. I do believe that the future is human-machine collaboration, and I’m trying to make it as 50% and 50% possible, and truly analyze this new medium through the lens of the most cutting-edge technologies: sound, image, and even smell.

So as a studio, we created the very first AI artwork using real-time video, audio, and scent molecules for the past four years, and we have been practicing this idea of not only seeing and hearing but also smelling and feeling this new genre, this new era. So, we have created AI perfumes and AI sense in the last four years. So many, so many unexpected things, I will say. There will be a lot of amazing things in Dataland that I don’t think ever came together.

With AI reshaping art, where do you see this fusion of technology and creativity going in the next decade?

I think what is incredibly inspiring with AI is a form of thinking brush. So, for the last 10 years, I have always collected our own data and trained our own AI models. So I’ve been practicing in a very different mindset. And I’m approaching this medium as more like an atelier, meaning we work with more than 5 billion images so far, hundreds of thousands of articles, and more. In all our AI projects, as soon as we have this data, we have a lot of curation and a lot of care for AI models which I think is very important for the next steps of this journey. I don’t believe the ready tools and ready systems are enough for breakthroughs for artists.

I think artists will eventually need to train their own models and collect their own data in the long run. So I do hope that we will be able to do these platforms as quickly as possible so that it doesn’t stay only on the very high entities and big entities. I think artists will need to play, break, and reimagine these tools, because we always ask the question as artists, what is beyond reality? And I think AI is one of those systems and technology can be a tool to answer this new imagination, and I’m calling this new medium generative reality. It’s not AR, it’s not VR, it’s not XR, I think we are generating realities in every inferencing and interaction with AI models. So, I think we are entering a new era. We will question what is real, and we will question what is creativity.

As AI gets more sophisticated, who deserves credit for AI-generated works, the machine or the creator behind it?

I don’t think it’s one way or another because I believe that we are becoming writers of writers, artists of artists, scientists of scientists. Who won the Nobel Prize Award for protein folding is a human, not AI, but a human who used AI to enhance human creativity and humanity’s science to the next level. I think it is very clear that it is possible to recognize who is using AI for which conditions. So I think it’s very possible to clearly articulate in which conditions AI is helping humanity.

This should be the same for art. If the artist is creating their own models, if the artist is pushing their own techniques, if the artist is creating their own data sets, I do believe the artist is the artist. AI is just an extension of the mind as a form of collaborator. If we need to give credit to a brush, a thinking brush, we should.

AI also raises ethical questions in art—what challenges do you see, and how can we use these technologies responsibly?

I think it all starts with data. I feel like data is the main layer of challenge, because clearly, everyone asks the same question, what is inside these models? Why does this model respond to me in this incredible way, how on earth this digital entity is giving me this incredible feedback and answers and reasoning? I think it’s the right question. Of course, it’s very hard to answer in such complex technologies and systems, knowing exactly where that input is coming from. It is a giant question, but in our humble experiments, because we know where data comes from, because we are aware of exactly which ethical AI sources we are using for our nature research, and we are learning how to do this. It’s very complex, but it’s very doable.

To answer what exactly is going on and where that data comes from, at least in our all exhibitions in the last 10 years, wherever we use AI, we demystify our algorithms. We demystify our AI usage techniques, data sources. So we do we did our best to, like, demystify how and why we use AI. I hope that this becomes a pattern across the world.

In an age where AI can generate art, what role do you think human artists will play in maintaining cultural narratives and preserving the essence of traditional art forms?

I do not believe anything is dangerous about the traditional art forms. Traditional art forms are cultural, like the history of humanity. They represent 1000s of years of experience in life. I do not believe they are harmed by this new world. As humanity, we improve ourselves, we try new things, and we explore things never done before. We have the nature of the quest, and weare not staying at the same time, at the same place, at the same culture. As an artist, I witnessed the birth of the Internet, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, and high quantum computation. Of course, as a generation of artists, I reflect what I see in the world.

Art is not about just now. Art is about the future. It can be about the future. So I feel like we are in this exciting time of humanity that is kind of using the past, imagining the future, experiencing now, and that’s, I think, a very unique part of humanity. It’s a new renaissance that we all in. So I think like art and everything else, we will be transforming completely.

You often describe AI as a partner in your creative process. Do you think it could ever replace human creativity, or even surpass it?

I just don’t see why. I mean, who will want AI to do the creative work? I mean, I don’t, and at least in my humble humanities journey of people who are advancing these technologies, I didn’t see any curator, and I didn’t meet with any artists saying, “Take my work AI,” so I don’t see that. Where is this idea coming from? I don’t know, but I didn’t meet anyone saying, ‘Take my creative work.’ I’m not doing my creative work. I didn’t see that because artists do not retire. So, I don’t know who would want that and why AI takes creativity into its hands, if it takes, who will give value to AI? I didn’t meet any collector saying that I want to collect AI work.

I met many collectors saying I want humans to use AI and artists to create AI work. If AI wants to have its own value systems, and AI decides ‘I need my own AI creatures to create something’ that’s a sci-fi story there, right there, but it is not the case that I’m seeing and hearing and talking at all. But maybe it’s just hysteria and maybe paranoia. But if you know how the system works, if you know how exactly AI works, I do believe we should ask other questions, what else can we do with it?

So, shouldn’t we be concerned about AI taking over human creativity?

AI is a technology that we all have to be concerned about. It’s the most powerful technology we ever created as humanity. Of course, without being a wishful thinker and a positive thinker, we have to be present, ask the right questions and truly criticize systems and understand them. But anyone who knows these technologies and these systems, anyone who creates those complex systems, again, I have not seen anyone saying that AI should do artists’ work, or I will let AI create art.

Can an algorithm truly convey human emotion, or is the emotional connection we feel to AI-generated art merely a reflection of our own interpretation?

I think it’s again between human-machine collaboration. In my work, I don’t see AI doing anything at all. I am the one that decides so many parameters. I am the one in charge of many, many important decisions. It is not just AI. So to say that to say that this is what AI does. It’s not the case in my work. Some people may try it a different way, most likely, but in my own conditions, and how I create my work, and how I think of AI as a partner, as a creator, as a collaborator, I am always the voice of control, the tone, the context, the discourse, the meaning, the purpose, I’m fully hands-on in every single step of my team and me. So in our case, we have 100% programming, the control, and the chance.

Do you think AI and digital tools can help make art more sustainable?

Super easy. The good news is, as I was practicing in the Amazonian rainforest and working with the indigenous people in the Amazonia and beyond, I learned so much about who they are and what they do, and clearly, they are protecting the forest for us for 1000s of years. I think what I learned is also it is pretty much possible to use renewable energy when it comes to cloud computing. So it’s super clear that AI requires scale. Scale means a lot of computing, computing means a lot of energy, not only by training but also by inferencing, meaning interacting with AI models.

So in our research, we partnered with Google Cloud friends, and we found these renewable energy resources. For example, we train our AI model completely on renewable energy. Yes, it’s slow, and yes, maybe it’s not the fastest AI in the world, but I know that it is safe for nature. It may be slow but it is not a problem for us, because we know that we train AI on nature without harming nature. So there are possibilities, and wonderful people are working on optimizing AI models to make them much less energy heavy and more, and even the hardware side, I know, like Nvidia, friends are working on optimizing the hardware and saving 40, 50% energy in a long time.