Refik Anadol's DATALAND: From a UCLA studio to a first-of-its-kind museum

Refik Anadol — MFA '14 from UCLA's Design Media Arts department, part of the School of the Arts and Architecture, where he's also a longtime lecturer — has opened DATALAND, billed as the world's first Museum of AI Arts, inside Frank Gehry's Grand LA complex in downtown Los Angeles. The anchor piece, "Infinity Room," (pictured above) started as a student project: Anadol built it during his second year at UCLA and first showed it at the Broad Art Center in 2012, under professors Jennifer Steinkamp, Casey Reas and Christian Moeller. Since then it's toured 35 cities and drawn more than 10 million visitors; the DATALAND version is its most ambitious iteration yet. The museum's inaugural exhibition, "Machine Dreams: Rainforest," turns ecological data — gathered with the Smithsonian and Cornell Lab of Ornithology — into immersive, AI-generated environments, and even weaves in the final recorded call of the extinct Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō bird.