Refik Anadol, the Art World’s Happy Warrior for A.I.

“All right!” Refik Anadol said, as the escalator carried us downward. “We are entering the dream of the machine.” We had arrived in the cavernous first gallery of Dataland, the twenty-five-thousand-square-foot space, in downtown Los Angeles, that Anadol calls the first museum of A.I. art. Space-age music blared night-club-loud as pictures of birds, plants, and flowers cascaded down the walls. This array was a small sample of the half-billion images—and the hundred thousand hours of audio, including birdsong, rain, and even silence—on which Anadol has trained the Large Nature Model, an A.I. model that powers “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” Dataland’s inaugural show. The pictures swooped around and beneath us like a cloud of starlings, and an earthy, slightly metallic smell emanated from the diffusers we wore around our necks, which, along with a biometric wristband, each Dataland visitor receives upon arrival. The aroma is one of twelve scents—formulated by the L.N.M., with a little help from L’Oréal Luxe—that perfume visitors’ trips through the museum’s five rooms. Anadol calls it “the scent of data.”