There are plans to open the world’s first permanent museum for AI art next year. Dataland, which is the brainchild of new media artist Refik Anadol, will be a 20,000 square-foot space that sits alongside galleries such as MOCA in the famed Frank Gehry-designed Grand L.A development, a culture hotspot in Los Angeles, California.
Anadol describes Dataland, which will host digital artworks and installations expressed through its own Large Nature Model (LNM), as a place “where human imagination meets the creative potential of machines”.
Refik Anadol Studio’s Large Nature Model is the world’s first open source AI model based solely on nature data. The model is trained on data secured by permission from partners, including millions of specimens, objects, images and sounds from the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, in addition to another half a billion images of nature.
The resulting multi-dimensional data visualization installations are mesmerizing and immersive, a “living museum made of pixels and voxels”. You can see an example below.
Not only is the Large Nature Model’s data ethically collected (as opposed to scraping data without permission, which is the approach of many AI image generators), but it is run on Google servers in Oregon that only use renewable energy, leading Anadol to label his model ‘ethical AI’.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Anadol says, “We are blending Gehry’s building with AI’s infrastructure and technology, and this never-seen-before art form”. He also explains that he is still working out what to call this new art form. It’s “not AR, not VR, not XR… the best name so far, and people love it, is generative reality.”
So is GR the future of art?
Is co-creating with AI the future of art?
For at least two years there has a been a tidal wave of AI-generated images hitting the mainstream photography world. An AI-generated image tricked judges to win a photo contest, and I spoke with award winning artists and photo contest organizers who had mixed feelings about AI in the art world. Some feel the rise of AI, especially in the arts, equates to the demise of what makes us human, while others are open minded about AI’s role in creativity.
Anadol is more than open minded. He embraces AI, describing its role in art to the Los Angeles Times as a “co-creator and co-being”.
His fascinating artwork isn’t just the result of a few word prompts into a generator, created using anyone’s data without their knowledge. Data is ethically sourced from partners and painstakingly labeled. In one example Anadol says they have 75 million flowers, which took a year to label, all of which are available for other artists and researchers to use too.
The Dataland team also personally collects data from unique locations around the world, such as rainforests, using various technologies including LiDAR, photogrammetry, ambisonic audio, high-resolution images and even scents.
Anadol’s practice makes for a compelling antidote to the all-too-often sinister and unethical use of AI in art. It’s a multi-sensory art form with the power to educate that some fans are even labeling a ‘movement’.
I’m relatively open minded about AI in art, though I prefer to celebrate human creativity, but I haven’t embraced AI and its presence in my daily life with the same passion as Anadol. However, his concepts have opened my mind to the positive ways AI can be used for creative purposes, and I’m super keen to check out Dataland, whenever it opens next year.
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