Refik Anadol, The Art World's Happy Warrior for A.I.

His new museum, Dataland, is a joyful monument to the technology. Is he a visionary, or Silicon Valley's court painter? Refik Anadol said, as the escalator carried us downward. "We are entering the dream of the machine." 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.