To find out where museums might go from here, ArtReview asked several professionals close to institutions for a diagnosis
The first time I visited MoMA, during my early twenties, I stood in front of a Rothko and felt something I could not explain – a vibration between the canvas and my body, as if the colour field was breathing, as if it knew I was there. Monet’s waterlilies dissolved the boundary between seeing and feeling. Picasso rewired space. Kandinsky made sound visible. Every room revealed that art could alter the architecture of consciousness. That feeling has driven everything since.
Efsun Erkılıç, my partner and cofounder, has been the architect of our studio’s reality just as much as I have been the dreamer of its visions. Our practice has always existed at the intersection of art, science and emerging technology, which means it has also depended on collaboration, trust and institutional courage. This journey has never been solitary. Together, we have navigated the complex interaction of artistic imagination and technological implementation, often asking institutions to attempt what had no precedent.
A lot of energy goes into adapting spaces that were designed for a fundamentally different relationship between art and audience. The white cube – that brilliant invention of the twentieth century – assumes the artwork is finished and fixed. I have watched conservators, technicians, curators and directors wrestle with questions their training never prepared them for: how do you preserve an artwork that is never the same twice? How do you light a room when the art is the light? What does it mean to ‘install’ something that is constantly becoming? At Walt Disney Concert Hall, projecting AI-generated visualisations across Gehry’s facade required months of collaboration. There was no playbook for mapping fluid simulations onto curved titanium, calibrating for ambient light or making a building appear to breathe without altering it physically. At the Serpentine and Casa Batlló, institutions bent infrastructure, rethought protocols and trusted disruption. At MoMA, where I had stood entranced those years before, the team behind Unsupervised (2022–23) embraced radical uncertainty by supporting an artwork trained on the museum’s own collection, allowing archival memory to become living material through continuous real-time generation.
I owe an enormous debt to museums as spaces of inspiration and as institutions that took risks on ideas that initially sounded impossible. But Efsun and I started to wonder: what if we could build something from the ground up that did not require that adaptation? We realised that retrofitting these incredible spaces meant we were always asking the architecture to be something it wasn’t. DATALAND, which opens this year at Gehry’s The Grand LA was born from the question: what does a space look like when the architecture itself is designed to dream alongside the machine? We call it a museum deliberately – not to compete with institutions I love, but because I believe the museum is our most powerful cultural frame, and it deserves to evolve.
Unlike galleries, fairs or purely digital platforms, the museum holds a unique responsibility. I would describe it as a shared promise to care for memory, to protect it and to pass it forward. When we enter a museum, we step into a continuum of human experience, where what we see is connected to what came before us and what will remain after us. This context gives unfamiliar ideas a different kind of meaning. They are invited into cultural memory, into a space where experimentation can become part of our collective heritage.
Museums have always been defined by what they choose to collect, and each era preserves the materials that shape its understanding of the world. At DATALAND, what we collect is data: environmental records, cultural archives and living signals that reflect both human and nonhuman experience. A ‘museum for data’ therefore preserves dynamic knowledge and transforms raw information into evolving forms of cultural memory.
DATALAND is built around what we call a Large Nature Model – an AI system trained on ethically collected ecological data: from coral reefs and rainforests to oceans and the atmosphere. This data becomes material for artworks that generate in real time. The building processes the pulse of the natural world and translates it into a living museum that visitors can feel, hear and even smell. This is not push-button interactivity, but entanglement between human creativity and presence, and machine intelligence mediated by nature. When we process the pulse of a rainforest or the deep currents of a coral reef, visitors won’t just see a visualisation on a screen. They might feel the low-frequency vibration of shifting weather patterns in the floor beneath them, or experience a synthesised scent profile triggered by real-time atmospheric data.
Collecting ecological data is central to our mission, as it allows us to register forms of life and environmental change that are often invisible to human perception, building an archive of planetary memory at a time when that memory is increasingly at risk.
Nothing replaces standing before a Rothko or losing yourself in Monet’s waterlilies. But digital and AI art require dedicated architectural, technical and curatorial frameworks that are extraordinarily difficult to retrofit. DATALAND is not meant as an alternative to the museums that shaped me, but as their next chapter – proof that the institution can be as alive as the art it holds.
It is fair to question whether a space built on code rather than canvas can truly be called a museum, or to look at AI art with a critical eye. I welcome that friction – because every major shift in art history began by challenging the boundaries of what an institution could hold. We have seen what happens when visionary teams push existing spaces to their limits. Imagine what becomes possible when the building itself is designed to dream.
Refik Anadol is an artist and cofounder of Refik Anadol Studio and DATALAND
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