Exclusive | Worlds first AI museum is vibrant sensory overload but is it really art?

Everything is moving so fast in the rainforest, with life pulsing all around: in front, above, and below your feet. The 360-degree cube takes the eye on a deep dive into exotic flora and fauna.Then comes an even deeper dive into the inner workings of trees, the sap pulsing through a usually invisible network. The vibrant, ever-moving images inside the windowless cube are created by 1.2 billion data prompts live-fed from 16 rainforests across the globe.

The ever-moving, gigantic images are accompanied by music — vast and engulfing — and smells, from floral to mossy to even electrical. This is the wildly immersive Data Pavilion inside Dataland, billed as the world’s first Museum of AI Arts, opening in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, June 20, inside The Grand LA complex. Dataland debuts with “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” a visceral, blow-your-mind immersion that goes far beyond data — certainly an art museum experience, but unlike few others. The sensory splash, co-founded by artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, showcases four more reality-bending galleries to explore — like the classic “Alice in Wonderland” meets “Avatar” or the trippy, new horror film “Backrooms.” Erkılıç watches, tears gathering on her cheeks, while recently venturing through Anadol’s Infinity Room, which zooms the eye and mind on a journey deep into the rainforest, a digital Shangri-La that displays the beauty of nature, as well as its fragilities. It’s far from a flat tech experience.This is machine-created art with heart: an emotionally moving experience that feels alive and, in fact, intelligent. But as you observe the art spread across the 25,000-square-foot “living museum” — an additional whopping 10,000 square feet of space houses the museum’s considerable tech — the art-slash-machine is observing and interacting with visitors via an optional wearable sensory wrist device issued at admission that captures intimate details like body ...