Refik Anadol chose Los Angeles to build the “world’s first Museum of AI Arts,” as he terms it, for good reason. The Light and Space movement was born in the city, starting in the 1960s, when James Turrell masked windows in a shuttered Santa Monica hotel to control the light. Light and Space artists (Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler and others) had a singular goal: to reduce the field of vision to perception itself.

Sixty years later, Turkish-born Anadol is opening Dataland in downtown Los Angeles, a 25,000-square-foot immersive entertainment complex that is designed to astonish. His new complex opens June 20 in the Frank Gehry-designed Grand complex, across the street from the Walt Disney Concert Hall, also designed by Gehry. All told, there are five galleries displaying visuals built from 1.5 billion pixels.

Dataland is the high-end expression of the immersive entertainment trend, valued at $12.4 billion in 2025, according to a 2026 study by Intel Market Research. At a recent preview, some questioned whether the AI-generated displays were actual art, or just “data that really looks cool,” as one viewer commented. New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz famously called Anadol’s 2022-2023 MoMA installation “a massive techno lava lamp” and “a half-million-dollar screensaver” despite, or perhaps because of, its popularity.

At Dataland, visitors are first ushered into a black room with vertical stations set with tall screens—reminiscent of entry into a spacecraft. Each guest scans an admission ticket, opening a box with wearables for the journey. A bio-sensing wristband measures heart rate, skin temperature, and galvanic skin response. Visitors also wear scent diffusers, which hang around the neck, provided by L’Oréal Luxe.

The wristband’s measurements are fed into a central link that interprets the physiological signals as various “emotions.” The Large Nature Model behind the visual displays uses those to create the displays. In short, different groups will see different artworks, all depending on their mood. What’s actually being captured by the sensors is closer to physiological arousal, the ways the nervous system is activated.

First up is the Data Pavilion, a cavernous space powered by 84 4K projectors. Here, Anadol’s Large Nature Model uses over 500 million images from 16 rainforest environments sourced through partnerships with London’s Natural History Museum, the Smithsonian, Getty, iNaturalist and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. There’s also live ecological data streaming in from rainforests—all influenced by the biosignatures from a few dozen visitors wearing wristbands.

The room presents a trippy sight, much like a hallucination. “The machine is dreaming” is how Anadol and his partner, Efsun Erkilic, term it. Enormous flowers unfurl and sail away into fractals. Light tunnels into new worlds, and flocks of birds, if they are indeed birds, dive and soar. At times, the scenes look realistic, but often quickly burst into fields of data, as if the machine has remembered that it is indeed not sentient.

Here and there, a scent of rain, humid earth, or a sweet flower arises—emitted from the neck wearables. It’s subtle and not overpowering.

The orchestral music, however, can seem overwrought, blasted through a 250-speaker audio system driven by L-ISA immersive sound from L-Acoustics. The sound hits you from everywhere. The feel of composer Kerim Karaoglu’s score is grandly cinematic, somewhat saved by the sacred healing songs of the Yawanawá that are woven into the mix. These human voices from the Amazon feel ancient, providing genuinely moving moments.

Moving on, the Latent Gallery has three LG touchscreens where visitors can generate nature imagery via the Large Nature Model. The results appear on screens as they’re created.

From there, visitors enter the Infinity Room, which is restricted to a dozen people. The space is an LED cube with panels covering the four walls, the ceiling, and floor. The AI-generated visuals are a true ride—you’ll swear the room is tilting, but it’s not. The journey travels deep into the Amazonian rainforest to encounter a glass hummingbird and a “wisdom tree” which resembles one that grows in the Amazon. The eight-minute filmic experience largely relies on spiraling, tunneling visuals common to recreations of acid trips. The scenes forever open onto new multi-hued rainforest mutations.

Another room displays a vertical projection set in a recessed frame—not actual, it’s a trick of the projected light. Digital waves undulate and swirl, garlands of flowers spiral outward—it’s all created from input from the bio-sensing wristbands, data that’s also displayed in another room at the end of the journey. Exiting, visitors are handed a data chip that can be scanned to create a personalized scent or a T-shirt emblazoned with AI art.