philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Dataland, the world’s first AI arts museum, will anchor the Grand complex in downtown L.A.

... The 20,000-square foot museum, whose exact opening date has not yet been announced, is being built with four gallery spaces by the Gensler architectural firm. An escalator will take guests from the entrance under a soaring, 30-foot ceiling to immersive experiences below. Dataland is privately funded and will collect and preserve artificial intelligence art; certain artworks may be sold on the blockchain. A nonprofit branch of the organization, founded in 2023 (called RAS AI Foundation), is dedicated to the expansion of ethical AI research.

Dataland won’t be like any other museum, said Anadol, who is calling it a “living museum” made of pixels and voxels, which are mathematical representations of 3D imagery. Its pièce de résistance is its very own AI model, called the Large Nature Model. Designed by Anadol’s studio, the model uses data sourced from partners including the Smithsonian (9 million public specimen records, 6.3 million public images, 148 million objects in its collection); London’s Natural History Museum (90 million specimens in its collection, 4 million public images); the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (54 million images, 2 million sound records). AI will create artworks using this data and more — up to a half-billion images of nature, Anadol said. 

Anadol was quick to add that he is making “ethical AI” the linchpin of his practice. He secured permission for every bit of sourced material (a step not always followed in AI-model training), and all of the studio’s AI research was performed on Google servers in Oregon that use only renewable energy. ...

See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2024-09-24/refik-anadol-dataland-ai-art-museum-the-grand-dtla