Dataland is literally something else as far as an art experience. Fiercely, even reverentially experiential, it is an immersive adventure into “living” AI. It is in a way a combination of familiar things rendered into something entirely different.
For me it was one part IMAX viewing experience; one part the traveling Van Gogh exhibition Immersive Van Gogh with its 360-degree, floor-to-ceiling animated digital video projections; and one part reminiscent of Images in Space and Time, an international collection of fine art holographs which originally came to Los Angeles in the 1990s via the California Museum of Science and Industry. The latter was semi-permanently located in the concourse galleries close to where Dataland is now.
The bottom line with Dataland is that it is entirely unique and a lot of fun, a spectacle of light and color and moving images.
The experience begins by listening to an introduction to the experience, and then donning a neck-wrap device the emits scents related to the visuals, and a wristband not dissimilar to a Fitbit, which measures your own personal metrics, which are then monitored by the AI.
Descending a mirrored escalator to a cavernous room where shifting light projections cover the walls and floor, over the course of about 40 minutes, there are flowers and trees and what look like living, surging seas and colorful beads and swarming colors and even moments that illuminate one’s own metrics in blue and white circles on the floor. A soundtrack merges with the scents that support the scene from forest to flower to sea breeze. This gallery is the Latent Forest.
It’s galvanizing and absolutely embraces the vision by the installation’s cofounders Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç with their inaugural Machine Dreams: Rainforest exhibition. The AI itself was trained on and based upon datasets about nature; culling information from diverse sources such as the Natural History Museum in London and the Smithsonian.
According to museum literature, the commitment to nature includes sustainability as to use, with the system operating on primarily carbon-free and renewable energy.
While that exhibition is the main, and longest experience at Dataland, it is not the only one. Upon exiting, Latent Forest, there is the interactive adventure of the Latent Gallery in which three separate kiosks allow hands on projections of various flowers,sea, and forest images that visitors can explore and learn about, such as orchids, mushrooms, specific trees.
In this area there was also a small stand where visitors could select, or have AI select based on its reading of ones’ personal metric, one of four flavors of chocolates. While my AI chose milk chocolate with mushrooms (and it is true, I do like Hershey bars to this day), I selected my own, the orange bitters and dark chocolate with cardamon.
There were two, timed, separate limited admission gallery experiences, the quite lovely and haunting “The Dream of Ruwe Pinu,” a journey through the Amazon rainforest led by a translucent hummingbird, and “The Sanctuary.”
The latter makes use of visitors’ own biometric information collected via their wristbands, and is vaguer in intent, consisting of patterns of writhing colorful, sand-art-style beads, blooming and snaky florals, and mysterious near-landscapes that materialize on the dimensional screen. It ends however, with the lovely sound of a bird now extinct, issuing its call to a non-existent mate. One could feel deeply elegaic about that birdsong. The bird is gone, and here we are, sitting in an air conditioned sanctuary enjoying its last poignant hope.
However, hopefulness, rather than a last, forlorn lost hope is really the intent of these exhibitions. One of the visitors came with an 18-month-old, who vividly enjoyed crawling around these smaller galleries, interacting with the patterns cost reflectively on the shining floors, and clearly as immersed in experience as one could possibly be.
The child was feeling joy in the sound, colors, scents, and lights. That is the true crux of this experience: its joyful, playful, and also resolute in its depiction of AI as our artistic friend or at least our artistic spectacle creator. While shaping our own memories it is also preserving existing ones, or dreamscapes that involve memories of nature’s rainbow.
Dataland is more art experience than museum or gallery, so with that in mind, go and experience it and all its scents, sounds, and motions.
- Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis