The “world's first museum of AI arts” is scheduled to open next month in a 35,000 square feet purpose-built facility in downtown Los Angeles. Dataland is the brainchild of Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkiliç, artists known for using artificial intelligence and vast datasets to create large-scale immersive art projects.
The “living museum” will present a continuously evolving immersive, audiovisual experience based on millions of images, sounds and scents from nature. As an indication of what it will be like, Dataland’s website presents phantasmagorical images of ecological wonder and awe. Anadol says he wants Dataland to develop a new paradigm of what a museum can be by fusing human imagination with machine intelligence.
But behind its futuristic facade, the museum has much deeper historical roots. A clear connection exists between the aspirations of Dataland’s founders and the 19th-century fascination with emerging technologies. Large-scale exhibitions promised new forms of public spectacle and commercialised entertainment.
The Crystal Palace exhibition was held in London in 1851. Visited by over six million people, it was designed to promote Britain as an industrial power. It showcased more than 100,000 objects from around the globe, including the world’s largest-known diamond, acquired from India two years earlier.
The “midway” at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was famous for its exhilarating amusements. It featured human display villages, or “human zoos”, that reinforced racist colonial hierarchies. This era kicked off the modern public museum movement in Europe and the United States. Early museums were rooted in Enlightenment ideals of industrial progress, civic education and national identity.
There is a darker side to the 19th-century precursors of Dataland. The project’s dataset is a large nature model (LNM) – an open-source model trained on half a billion images sourced “ethically” from partner institutions, including the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and London’s Natural History Museum. Dataland’s website does not provide provenance information about partner institutions’ source collections. But we know they would likely include 19th-century specimens.
Natural history collecting was a lucrative industry in the 19th century. Museum collecting was deeply entangled with the violent, systemic processes of European imperialism, colonial expansion and scientific exploitation.
Dataland promotes its “permission-based” approach to using data from institutions. It cites contemporary collaboration with the Yawanawá people of the Amazon as “radically responsible”. But Dataland does not appear to apply its own ethical standards to the vast historical resources it sources from its partner museums.
It is silent on the obligations it may have to contemporary descendants of communities from which specimens and knowledge were extracted. It provides no guardrails about appropriate cultural protocols or safeguards. This approach is out of step with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The lack of transparency and self-awareness regarding the large nature model’s use of historical collection materials is a significant oversight. Dataland is a museum of the future. But it cannot outrun the historical and very human legacies of the form it has chosen to align itself with – the museum.
The Conversation