Imagine stepping into the Amazon rainforest without the 12-hour flight, the humidity, or the risk of stepping on something that wants to bite you. That’s the premise behind Dataland, a brand-new museum in Los Angeles that opens to the public on June 20, where visitors won’t just see the rainforest—they’ll help the AI create it in real time.
The brainchild of Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkilic, the inaugural exhibition is called “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” and it’s powered by 10 million lines of code animating 1.5 billion pixels across walls and surfaces. The experience taps into a genuinely clever idea: Anadol visited the Brazilian Amazon and wanted others to feel that same connection to nature, but he realized not everyone needs to trek into the jungle. So instead, he asked a better question: can the rainforest come to us?
Here’s where it gets interesting. Visitors wear medical-grade watches that monitor heart rate and emotions, carry portable scent diffusers to smell wet earth and rain, and trigger wall-mounted sensors that track their movements throughout the space. All that biometric data feeds directly into the AI, which uses billions of images and datapoints to create an ever-evolving display. The system never shows you the same thing twice—it’s constantly “dreaming,” as Erkilic describes it, gathering information and reshaping the experience based on what it learns from each visitor.
This isn’t some static projection mapped onto a wall. The AI is building and rebuilding its interpretation of reality in real time, trying to recreate the essence of the rainforest from data points rather than raw footage. It’s a genuinely poetic approach to immersion: instead of realism, you get something closer to how the forest *feels*—alive, responsive, unpredictable.
The experience ends with tangible souvenirs: chocolates with flavors the model generated, t-shirts and paintings born from your interaction with the system. “The system forgets you; that is the beauty of it,” Anadol explains. You walk out with a piece of a dream that technically never existed before you entered.
It’s a fascinating collision of technology, art, and environmentalism—the kind of idea that makes you wonder what else AI could teach us about the world we’re forgetting to visit.
