A flashy new AI-powered museum opening in downtown Los Angeles this weekend is already turning heads — and potentially stomachs.
Dataland, backed by Google technology, opens Saturday inside The Grand LA, the Frank Gehry-designed development.
Before visitors even cross the threshold of this futuristic world, the ticket prices deliver a sharp dose of reality.
The museum is built entirely on the concept that data acts as the new oil paint or pigment for the digital age. Getty Images
The premier exhibit, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, runs on the world’s first open-source, multimodal AI model trained purely on nature data. Getty ImagesAdmission runs between $49 and $79 per person, making Dataland one of the priciest museum experiences in Los Angeles.
That’s significantly more than many of the city’s biggest cultural institutions, including LACMA, the Academy Museum, the Natural History Museum, MOCA and The Broad — while the Getty Center remains free.
Rather than scraping the open web indiscriminately, the AI was trained on over 5 billion ethically sourced data images and archives. Getty ImagesThe centerpiece is the sprawling “Data Pavilion,” where projections race across floors and walls simultaneously, enveloping guests in a torrent of rapidly evolving imagery.
The space is structured as what creators call an “omni-sensory ecosystem,” meaning visuals, sound, and scent are generated in real time and shift in response to visitor presence.
But the immersive design may not be for everyone.
A reporter for the LAist who got an early preview described the experience as ‘dizzying’ while other visitors have described feeling as though they were physically moving even while standing still, a sensation created by the overwhelming visual intensity surrounding them.
Notably, the entire setup runs on infrastructure powered by 87% carbon-free renewable energy.
The flagship Data Pavilion wraps visitors in 3,500 square feet of LED screens projecting up to 1.5 billion pixels. Getty Images
The artwork on the walls is not a prerecorded loop; the system pulls real-time environmental and meteorological data from actual rainforests, causing the art to evolve dynamically as weather changes. Getty Images for Dataland
To combat AI’s heavy energy footprint, Dataland’s servers are hosted on a Google Cloud infrastructure located in a low-CO2 compute zone in Oregon, operating on 87% carbon-free renewable energy. Getty ImagesThe museum is the culmination of nearly a decade of collaboration between Google and digital artist Refik Anadol, a partnership that began in 2016 and expanded into increasingly ambitious AI art projects, including visualizations of quantum computing data and large-scale installations at Google’s Mountain View campus.
Alongside the museum’s launch, Google Arts & Culture is supporting a six-month AI artist residency program selecting four artists, each receiving $25,000 grants, mentorship from Anadol’s studio, and access to advanced machine learning tools, with final works to be exhibited both in the museum and through Google’s platforms.
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