“What lies beyond reality?” asks the artist Refik Anadol. His most recent projects include Dataland, an immersive art museum in Los Angeles (pictured above), and an installation at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC
Refik Anadol Studio on behalf of Dataland
Hide caption
Toggle label
Refik Anadol Studio on behalf of Dataland
Visiting the new Dataland museum in downtown Los Angeles is like entering a hyperreal nighttime fantasy.
As visitors move through black, cavernous rooms, they hear at various points the sounds of creatures from the Amazon rainforest, a tropical thunderstorm, and excerpts from a recording of Mahler by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Symphony No. 3.
In one room, they see what a hummingbird would see flying through a dense, colorful landscape. In another, they stand in front of a huge, three-dimensional painting in which bright, abstract shapes jump out of the frame in real-time response to biometric data collected via wearable bracelets – similar to fitness trackers. The museum also has a smell and taste component. It’s sensory overload.
No two visitor experiences at Dataland, which opened in June, are exactly the same. But they all come from the unique creative mind of Refik Anadol.
Table of Contents
Transform data into visions
The digital artist behind what he calls “the world’s first museum of AI art” has spent a decade using AI algorithms to transform massive data sets into bombastic, three-dimensional installations of light and sound.
To create the immersive art in Dataland, the artist fed images and sounds from museum archives, laboratories, and even his own trips to the Brazilian Amazon into a custom AI model. He then instructed this model to create specific scenarios, such as the dreamlike hummingbird narrative. He describes his work as a 50:50 collaboration between humans and machines.
“Every artist in his practice has his own difficult question,” Anadol said in a recent interview with NPR at the museum he founded with his partner Efsun Erkılıç. “My difficult question is: What lies beyond reality?”
Artist Refik Anadol is shown during a press preview for his work Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive Exhibition at the Serpentine North Gallery in London in February 2024.
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Hide caption
Toggle label
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
The now forty-year-old Los Angeles-based artist has been pondering this question since he played and watched games on his first computer, a Commodore 64, as a child in Istanbul Blade Runner.
Anadol said a line from the 1982 sci-fi thriller left a lasting impression on him: “Implants. These aren’t your memories. They belong to someone else,” Harrison Ford’s character Deckard tells Sean Young’s Rachael. She is not a real person, but a machine. “I never stopped thinking about what a machine could do with other people’s memories,” Anadol said.
Turning Messi’s memories into art
His recent collaboration with Lionel Messi shows how.
The Argentine soccer star collaborated with the bespectacled, cherubic-looking artist on an immersive installation in New York last summer. It used match footage, biometric data and movement tracking to reconstruct Messi’s memories of his career-defining goal in 2009.
The resulting room-sized artwork transported visitors into a swirling fantasy with bouncing balls, morphing nets and slow-motion action shots of Messi. Think of it as a fantastic journey into the athlete’s mind. “Football is ingrained in my DNA growing up in Istanbul,” Anadol said. “But I didn’t know that one day I would work with Messi.”
Anadol’s fans – and critics
Anadol is arguably as big a celebrity in the world of contemporary art as Messi is in sports.
His art served as a backdrop at the Grammy Awards. He is on Time Magazine’s 2025 list of the 100 most influential people in AI. His 2022-23 installation “Unsupervised” was the first work of art created with generative AI ever acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art for its permanent collection.
But some people reject Anadol’s technology-driven vision.
Artistic representations of Machine dreams: rainforest, Dataland’s inaugural exhibition, on view until January 2027.
Refik Anadol Studio on behalf of DATALAND
Hide caption
Toggle label
Refik Anadol Studio on behalf of DATALAND
new York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz called “Unsupervised” a “glorified lava lamp.”
Other critics fault Anadol’s close ties to major technology companies like Nvidia and Google, as well as its use of free, publicly available archives from sources like The Smithsonian and Oxford University to create the AI models that underpin its for-profit projects like Dataland – where standard entry starts at $49.”
“For me it’s like the perfect picture of art in late capitalism,” said artist and researcher Deniz Johns, who co-authored a 2025 book chapter on Anadol’s work.
Collaboration with patrons
Anadol counters that anyone can have free access to the models his studio develops and that contemporary artists’ relationships with rich and powerful benefactors are nothing new.
“Let’s go back six centuries to the Renaissance,” Anadol said. “When there are breakthroughs in art, there is always a patron.”
“His ideas are delightfully crazy,” said Amit Sood, Google vice president and founder of Google Arts & Culture.
Visitors experience Dataland on opening day in June.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Hide caption
Toggle label
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Sood said the company has supported Anadol’s work for about a decade. Anadol’s studio uses Google Cloud infrastructure, running on a server farm in Oregon that runs largely on carbon-free renewable energy, according to Google. Google Arts & Culture has funded artist residencies at the museum. (Google is also a financial supporter of NPR.)
“Refik is very optimistic about how technology can help him achieve some of the things he dreams of,” Sood said.
Is dreaming just for humans?
And he’s not just interested in his own dreams.
“Refik asked the question: If the Smithsonian Castle could be viewed as an object to dream about, what would the castle dream about?” said Lisa Sasaki, deputy undersecretary for special projects at the Smithsonian.
Jeremy Norwood/Norwood Photography/The Smithsonian
To answer that question, Sasaki said Anadol uploaded the Smithsonian’s institutional memory — millions of digitized specimens, scientific records and manuscripts — into a custom AI model.
He then used it earlier this month to cover the facade of the Smithsonian Castle in fast-paced, AI-powered projections ranging from swirling abstract shapes to the American flag. The title of the installation: “Smithsonian Dreams”.
Anadol said, at least for now, dreaming is only for humans. “Of course machines don’t dream. Machines are collaborators.”
But the artist added that it may not be long before they can.
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/29/nx-s1-5894941/ai-art-dataland-refik-anadol
