A prominent AI artist has announced he will open the world’s first AI art museum in Los Angeles, which will highlight the “intersection of human imagination and the creative potential of machines”.
The artificial intelligence art museum, dubbed Dataland, is slated to open in late 2025, in a new development next to the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Broad Museum and the home of the LA philharmonic, creating a space for AI art among some of Los Angeles’s most prestigious cultural venues.
Dataland co-founder Refik Anadol, 38, is a media artist whose “crowd-pleasing – and controversial” works using artificial intelligence have been displayed around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Serpentine and, most recently, the United Nations headquarters.
In the past two years, Anadol has found himself at the center of debates over the value of AI-generated art, as crowds have been reportedly “transfixed” by his massive interactive digital canvases, while some art critics have panned them as over-hyped and mediocre.
Now Anadol is looking to build artists like himself a permanent exhibition space among some of LA’s most prominent high-culture venues, and he is pledging that the AI art museum will promote “ethical AI” and use renewable energy sources.
“LA – and California – is the right place for imagining new worlds,” Anadol said. While he is a longtime fan of the film Blade Runner, he rejected the idea that there might be anything dystopian about founding an AI art museum in the heart of Los Angeles. “This museum is utopian,” he said.
With Dataland, Anadol said, he and his small team of artists and technologists hope to reinvent the museum for the artificial intelligence era, while highlighting the innovative work of digital artists, who have long been viewed with scepticism by more traditional arts establishments, as well as providing a space for ongoing scientific and technological research.
He said he is trying to create a new, high-tech physical museum space, outfitting the building itself “with cloud computing and special sensors and special activities”.
While he hopes to use his new museum to demystify AI, Anadol, who has worked with Google, Nvidia and other major industry players, also says that the potential of the technology is vast.
“AI is not a tool. AI is beyond a tool,” he said. “Literally, in human history, we have never had intelligence as a technology.”
In the wake of last year’s historic double Hollywood strike, when both writers and actors took to the picket lines with concerns over AI being used to replace human artists, Los Angeles may be one of the cities in the world where culture workers are most hostile to artificial intelligence.
Anadol said that he shared some of the Hollywood artists’ concerns, and that they were also “right about” some criticisms of the AI economy.
“I don’t believe machines should be the only creators. It’s a horrible future if you just let the machines do creative work,” he said.
Anadol said he believed it was important for artists to build their own artificial intelligence tools, and that simply using a tool someone else had built was not enough. “I collect my own data, train my own model,” he said. “I am literally co-creating with the machine in every single step.”
The museum will highlight “ethically collected” datasets, Anadol said, like his Large Nature Model, a open-source, generative AI tool built with data shared by the Smithsonian, the UK’s Natural History Museum and other prominent institutions.
And, as the AI industry faces major scrutiny over the immense amount of energy it requires, Anadol said he aims to be transparent about the energy usage behind the museum’s new tools and technologies. He said he worked with Google to find a sustainable energy park in Oregon to power its AI tools without using fossil fuels, even if that means the process is slower.
“Here the idea is not about being fast, or first – it’s about being right,” Anadol said.
The Museum of AI Arts is starting as a for-profit venture, though Anadol said he is open to moving in a non-profit direction if the new venture can secure the patrons who would make that possible.
“AI arts is a very new art form. It is barely explored. It is just starting,” he said.
Not yet 40 and already exhibiting his work globally, Anadol is very much a man on the move – sometimes quite literally, as he spoke to the Guardian in part from a taxi driving through New York City on the day of the United Nations general assembly.
Last year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired Anadol’s Unsupervised, a giant digital canvas that uses artificial intelligence to generate new, constantly shifting displays based on 200 years of images from Moma’s own collection. Anadol said that this was the Moma’s first acquisition of a generative AI work.
Anadol, who teaches in the design department at the University of California, Los Angeles, is well connected in the LA art and museum worlds. His work is prominently featured in the Getty’s current southern California arts festival, PST: Art, and, in a recent interview before the museum announcement, the Getty’s president and CEO, Katherine Fleming, named him as “probably LA’s most famous AI artist”.
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