Visiting the new Dataland museum in downtown Los Angeles is like stepping into a hyperreal nighttime fantasy.
At various points as visitors move through black, cavernous spaces, they hear the sounds of Amazon rainforest creatures, a tropical thunderstorm, and excerpts from a Los Angeles Philharmonic recording of Mahler's Symphony No. 3.
In one room they see what a hummingbird would see as it flies through a dense, vividly-colored landscape. In another, they stand before a massive, three-dimensional painting where bright, abstract shapes splash out of the frame in a real-time response to biometric data captured via wearable wristbands – kind of like fitness trackers. The museum also has a smell and taste component. It's sensory overload.
No two visitors' experiences of Dataland, which opened in June, are exactly alike. But they all stem from the singular creative mind of Refik Anadol.
Transforming data into visions
The digital artist behind what he calls "the world's first museum of AI arts" has spent a decade using AI algorithms to transform massive troves of data into bombastic, three-dimensional installations of light and sound.
To create the immersive art at Dataland, the artist fed images and sounds from museum archives, labs and even his own travels to the Brazilian Amazon into a custom AI model. He then directed that model to create specific scenarios, such as the dream-like hummingbird narrative. He describes his work as a 50-50 collaboration between humans and machines.
"Every artist in their practice has their own heavy question," Anadol told NPR in a recent interview at the museum, which he co-founded with his partner Efsun Erkılıç. "My heavy question is: What is beyond reality?"
It's a question the now forty-year-old, Los Angeles-based artist has been pondering since he was a kid in Istanbul playing games on his first computer, a Commodore 64, and watching Blade Runner.
Anadol said one line in particular from the 1982 sci-fi thriller left a lasting impression on him: "Implants. Those aren't your memories. They're somebody else's," Harrison Ford's character Deckard tells Sean Young's Rachael. She's not a real human, but a machine. "I never stopped thinking about what a machine could do with someone else's memories," Anadol said.
Transforming Messi's memories into art
His recent collaboration with Lionel Messi shows how.
The Argentinian soccer star collaborated with the bespectacled, cherubic-looking artist on an immersive installation last summer in New York. It used match footage, biometric data, and movement tracking to reconstruct Messi's memories of scoring a career-defining goal in 2009.
The resulting, room-sized artwork engulfed visitors in a swirling fantasia featuring bouncing balls, morphing nets and slow-motion action shots of Messi. Think of it as a fantastical journey inside the athlete's head. "Growing up in Istanbul, football is in the DNA," Anadol said. "But I didn't know I would one day work with Messi."
Anadol's fans — and critics
Anadol is arguably as big a celebrity in the contemporary art world as Messi is in sports.
His art has served as a backdrop at the Grammy Awards. He's on Time Magazine's 2025 list of the hundred most influential figures in AI. His 2022-2023 installation, "Unsupervised" was the first artwork created using generative AI ever acquired by New York's Museum of Modern Art for its permanent collection.
But some people dismiss Anadol's tech-fueled visions.
New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz called "Unsupervised" a "glorified lava lamp."
Other detractors take issue with Anadol's cozy relationships with big tech companies like Nvidia and Google, as well as his use of free, publicly available archives from sources including The Smithsonian and Oxford University to build the AI models that underpin his for-profit projects, like Dataland — where standard entry starts at $49."
"To me, it's like the perfect picture of art in late capitalism," said artist and researcher Deniz Johns, who co-authored a 2025 book chapter about Anadol's work.
Working with patrons
Anadol counters that anyone can have free access to the models his studio develops, and that there's nothing new about contemporary artists' relationships with rich and powerful benefactors.
"Let's go six centuries back to the Renaissance," Anadol said. "When art has breakthroughs, there's always a patron."
"His ideas are pleasingly bonkers," said Amit Sood, a Google vice president and founder of Google Arts & Culture.
Sood said the company has supported Anadol's work for about a decade. Anadol's studio uses Google Cloud infrastructure running on a server farm in Oregon, which Google says operates largely on carbon-free renewable energy. Google Arts & Culture has underwritten artist residencies at the museum. (Google is also a financial supporter of NPR.)
"Refik is very optimistic about how technology can help him achieve some of the things that are in his dreams," Sood said.
Is dreaming just for humans?
And he's not just interested in his own dreams.
"Refik posed this question of, if the Smithsonian Castle could be seen as an object that dreams, what would the Castle dream about?" said Lisa Sasaki, deputy undersecretary for special projects at the Smithsonian.
To answer this question, Sasaki said Anadol uploaded the Smithsonian's institutional memory — millions of digitized specimens, scientific records, and manuscripts — into a custom AI model.
He then used it to engulf the facade of the Smithsonian Castle earlier this month in careening, AI-powered projections that ranged from swirling abstract forms to the American flag. The installation's title: "Smithsonian Dreams."
Anadol said at least for now, dreaming is just for humans. "Of course, machines don't dream. Machines are collaborators.
But the artist added it might not be too long before they can.
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