It was not even a decade ago when we visited the Artechouse in DC, and had our first ever experience of engaging with a fully “digital” museum. We knew right then that a cultural shift would be taking place...but we could not have imagined the speed with which it would happen.

Since then, the endless parade of immersive exhibitions based on everything from famous artists like Van Gogh, Klimt and Dali, to science and nature, including the oceans, micro-organisms and even outerspace itself, have arguably caused a bit of “digital fatigue” to set in. Then in 2022 the good people of Excurio took it a step further with the extravagant VR productions 'Horizon of Khufu' and then later 'Tonight With the Impressionists', which respectively allowed visitors to journey through Ancient Egypt, and also be hurtled back to more recent history to attend the first exhibition of Impressionist artists in 19th Century Paris.

But after the not-unexpected failures of NFT art (see: the Beeple debacle) it was only a matter of time before artworks generated by AI would be honored with their own temple of eye-popping futurism - which has now come in the form of the newly opened, and quite appropriately named Dataland in Los Angeles. 

Subtitled 'The Museum of AI Arts', it is indeed filled with visual wonders generated by artificial intelligence. Yet it is not just another immersive carnival dreamed up by some prolific event production company. Rather, it is the brainchild of Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, the former a high-profile digital artist whose 2018 book 'Why AI Hallucinates: The BotVerse Begins' had some critics calling him a cultural prophet, and Efsun Erkılıç, a new media artist and Anadol's creative, business and life partner.

“For many years, we have dreamed of a place where audience and artwork could merge," Anadol explains, "a laboratory of imagination where we can explore burgeoning new art forms. At Dataland, that dream has now become reality - and we are so excited to share it with the public."

The museum's inaugural presentation is 'Machine Dreams: Rainforest', which would surely suggest a digital interpretation of one of Planet Earth's most primal landscapes. It is the product of the studio's Large Nature Model, which was trained to decipher a vast swath of "ethically sourced" ecological data, and generate visually awe-inspiring virtual ecosystems from it.

Most intriguingly, a device is connected to each visitor's wrist, continually reading things like heart rates and skin temperatures to measure in-real-time their individual emotional reactions - which then collectively affect the overall visual presentation, in a very give-and-take fashion. For those with aroma-therapeutic inclinations, a second device draped around the neck creates an individualized "scent" experience, assuring none of the senses is left unaffected.

There is an actual "data exchange" mysteriously occurring between the visitors and the artworks - meaning multiple visits will allow for a totally new experience each time. With five unique galleries and 25,000 square feet of exhibition space, there is frankly little chance of ever becoming bored here.

Of course, while debates rage on about the ethical boundaries between the noble human creation of artworks based on ideas and feelings, and the less viscerally generated AI images that now compete with them for attention, Dataland thankfully makes no claims of being the new alternative to MoMA or the Guggenheim. Rather, it seeks to provide thought-provoking insights, in the most dazzling, breathtaking of ways, as to how technology might be reshaping our visual culture - and what that will mean for our ability to comprehend the world around us.

Erkılıç enthuses, “We see it as a bridge between the visionaries who shaped our past, and the creative possibilities of our future."

Or as Anadol so poetically puts it, “For five thousand years humans have been emotionally moved by artworks; but the relationship has always flowed in one direction. With Dataland we're asking, ‘Is it possible for artworks to feel us back?’"