“I think we “We are literally in a renaissance,” says artist Refik Anadol, in a typically optimistic comment, when asked how he sees this moment in art history, with artificial intelligence booming but controversial as a medium. “We just don’t have a name for it yet.”

Anadol, known for its technological facilities that investigate the relationship between humans and machines, has reason to be happy. On June 20, Dataland, the avant-garde downtown Los Angeles gallery he co-founded with his studio partner Efsun Erkılıç, opened its doors to an enthusiastic audience. Billed as the world’s first “AI arts museum,” it welcomed more than 10,000 visitors to the inaugural exhibition in the first two weeks, Anadol tells WIRED.

Courtesy of Datalandia

The set piece is the most ambitious to date, an immersive architectural vision titled Machine dreams: tropical jungle. Its interactive digital screens, which respond directly to visitors’ movements and biometric data (tracked by wearable devices), produce constantly changing images and soundscapes drawn from Anadol’s Large Nature Model, an artificial intelligence system built using natural science archives from prestigious research institutions such as the Smithsonian.

“For three years, we started from scratch, training our own AI models and working with our own data sets,” says Anadol. He and his team traveled to the Amazon and other rainforests to capture raw materials that would fuel the model’s hallucinated versions of those environments. “We have 5 petabytes of raw data that we collected ourselves,” Anadol says. He’s proud that Dataland has worked hard to obtain this treasure with the consent and participation of researchers, while major Silicon Valley AI companies have faced backlash and lawsuits for what many creators say is unlicensed, extractive use of their content as training data.

Anadol adds that Google DeepMind gave Dataland access to “experimental low-power” resources, allowing the gallery to run on Google Cloud and maintain “sustainable computing.” (Anadol has collaborated with the tech giant since becoming the first person to receive the Google Artists and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency in 2016.)

Ethics, environmental responsibility, and a staunch effort to produce what looks like a living, breathing ecosystem with artificial intelligence – these commitments are crucial if Anadol and Dataland want to redefine the “art of AI.” The phrase itself is a failure for many creatives and critics of the generative “slide” that has infested visual media at all levels. Anadol is perfectly aware that people reject such things and hardly blames them. “I mean, 100 percent, the majority are right,” he says, noting that when someone hears about the art of AI, “their first assumption is like quick engineering or a bunch of eight-second clips.”