You walk into a museum, look at a canvas, and walk away. For centuries, that was the entire deal. The art didn't care that you were there. It didn't look back. It didn't change its behavior based on your pulse.
Refik Anadol just changed that ruleset in Los Angeles.
At DATALAND, a new museum located at Frank Gehry’s The Grand LA complex, the inaugural exhibition Machine Dreams: Rainforest forces a completely different relationship with digital art. It isn't just a static loop playing on a massive screen. It's a living, breathing computational ecosystem that reacts directly to your body. If you think AI art is just generated imagery slapped onto a wall, this exhibition is a loud, sensory correction.
The Tech Under the Hood
The scale of this thing is slightly absurd. Spanning 25,000 square feet across five distinct galleries, the space runs on a high-performance computing system built with NVIDIA called Connectome. We are talking about 1.5 billion pixels total, driven by 84 Epson 4K projectors and over 1,500 custom 10K LED panels.
The software running this hardware is the Large Nature Model (LNM). Unlike commercial AI tools trained on scraped internet data, the LNM is built on an open-access dataset of over 500 million images sourced from institutions like the Smithsonian, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the Natural History Museum in London. Anadol’s team also gathered first-hand field data from 16 different rainforests globally.
The result? The machine isn't pulling random internet garbage to generate its visuals. It's pulling from a tightly controlled, ethically sourced library of real earth science.
When the Art Feels You Back
The real shift happens when you put on the gear. Ticket-holders don't just walk through the space; they plug into it. You are handed a medical-grade biosensing wristband designed by Empatica. This device continuously monitors your heart rate, skin temperature, and skin conductivity.
That data doesn't go into a corporate marketing database. Instead, it feeds directly into the LNM in real time. The machine reads the collective emotional and physiological state of the room, using those data points to shift the rhythm, colors, and evolutionary paths of the visuals.
You also carry a wearable scent device around your neck. Developed with L'Oréal Luxe, the system cycles through 12 custom olfactive notes—like wet earth, morning mist, and crushed leaves—triggered by the environmental data and your own body’s reactions. Coupled with a 250-speaker sound system playing a blend of electronic music and real rainforest acoustics, the experience hits almost every sense you have.
Inside the Five Galleries
The exhibition moves through distinct phases, and the pacing is intentionally uneven.
The initial room uses massive mirrored surfaces to distort the imagery, echoing the spatial experiments of classic light-and-space artists like James Turrell. From there, you hit the high-profile Infinity Room. Here, a three-dimensional LED cube wraps around the floor, ceiling, and all four walls. The central narrative follows a glass hummingbird—a visual motif inspired by Anadol's time spent with the Yawanawá Indigenous community in the Brazilian Amazon. The tribe's chief allowed the studio to visualize this specific dream sequence, creating a direct link between ancestral memory and machine processing.
Later sections break away from pure observation. In the Latent Gallery, you can interact directly with the LNM using transparent touch screens, using what the studio calls a "thinking brush" to alter the data visualizations yourself.
The Post-AI Aesthetic
Critics of generative art often point to its lack of physical presence. Anadol tries to subvert this at the exit. You don't just walk out into a gift shop full of generic posters. Instead, the exhibition allows you to print custom clothing based entirely on the specific data patterns generated during your individual walk-through.
They even brought taste into the equation. The studio partnered with Valerie Confections to create "Data Chocolate"—a four-piece edible art installation where the flavor profiles are determined by the model's computations.
The entire system runs out of a cloud infrastructure in Oregon operating on 87 percent carbon-free renewable energy. Anadol claims the power required to process a single visitor's entire stay is roughly equivalent to charging a smartphone once. It's a necessary metric to share, especially given the massive energy footprint typically associated with high-level AI computing.
If you plan to visit, do not rush through the entry pavilion. The system needs time to aggregate your biodata before the environmental shifts become obvious. Give it at least twenty minutes in the first two rooms to let the tracking settle. Pay close attention to how the audio density changes when the room gets crowded; the machine actively recalibrates the rainforest's acoustic canopy based on human presence.
Tickets are available directly through the DATALAND portal, with the exhibition scheduled to run through January 31, 2027.
