Dataland's AI Rainforest: A Review of Refik Anadol's Machine Dreams

Turkish media artist Refik Anadol has opened Dataland, a new brick-and-mortar platform for tech-based art, in the Grand LA hotel and shopping complex in Los Angeles. The inaugural exhibition, 'Machine Dreams: Rainforest', showcases Anadol's proprietary 'Large Nature Model' (LNM), an AI trained on natural data that generates rainforest-inspired imagery. The exhibition, supported by Google, LG, NVIDIA, Epson, and L'Oréal, spans five galleries and includes interactive installations that use biometric data from visitors to tailor the experience. However, critic Claudia Ross, writing for ArtReview, found the artworks lackluster and the biometric surveillance invasive. The exhibition features a 'Data Pavilion – Latent Forest' with LiDAR sensors tracking movement, and a 'Latent Gallery' with touchscreens for manipulating flora icons. A 'Sanctuary' displays visitors' biodata as chaotic graphs, and a 360-degree video tells a dream narrative involving a glass hummingbird and the Yawanawá Indigenous group. Ross criticizes the exhibition's environmental rhetoric as unconvincing, given AI's energy and water consumption, and notes a L'Oréal-induced face rash as the only truly tailored effect. The exhibition runs through 31 January.