Google and Refik Anadol Launch Dataland the First Permanent Physical AI Art Museum and Residency Program in Los Angeles
Google has collaborated with media artist Refik Anadol to open Dataland, the world first permanent physical museum entirely dedicated to AI art. In a blog post dated 18 June, Google announced that the museum will open on 20 June in Los Angeles, within the Grand LA complex by architect Frank Gehry. The he (Google) describes it as a 25,000 square foot omni sensory ecosystem in which environmental data is converted into real time digital paintings
Their work together as a technology company collaborating with the artist has been over a decade, starting when Anadol was involved in Google's first Artists and Machine Intelligence program. Since then, they've collaborated on multiple major public installations, such as the projection mapping projects for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the data visualization work for Google Quantum AI. The physical museum, then, is the project that culminates their work experimenting with machine learning as a creative tool.
The first show Machine Dreams Rainforest makes use of the Large Nature Model. This is an AI based model, trained on special datasets of nature. In order to translate these intricate natural systems into 1,200,000,000 pixels of generative images, the museum depends on Google Cloud platform. This cloud platform consumes the incoming environmental data to generate time based natural sonics, compute audience feelings and changing aromas in the gallery space to maintain an interactive discourse with the visitor.
The processing load of the galleries is managed by the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and Compute Engine. This system, which is hosted in Google Cloud's servers (which are 87% carbon free), stiches together several complex models (including generative adversarial networks and diffusion models), to modify the visual results according to the motion of the viewers so as to create a real time art work.
In order to promote more growth within the digital art field, Google Arts and Culture is funding the Dataland AI Artist Residency along with the launch of the museum. This 6 month residency grants 4 digital artists grants of $25,000 to help boost their work. Each artist will also have access to Refik Anadol Studio, direct mentorship, and access to Google Cloud Computing. The art created during the residency will all be exposited at Dataland and within the Google Arts and Culture.
