A flashy new AI-powered museum opening in downtown Los Angeles this weekend is already turning heads — and potentially turning stomachs.
Dataland, backed by Google technology, opens Saturday inside The Grand LA, the Frank Gehry-designed development downtown. But before visitors even step inside the futuristic attraction, they may experience a bit of shock at the ticket window.
Admission runs between $49 and $79 per person, making Dataland one of the priciest museum experiences in Los Angeles.
That’s significantly more than many of the city’s biggest cultural institutions, including LACMA, the Academy Museum, the Natural History Museum, MOCA and The Broad — while the Getty Center remains free.
Early reports also suggest the experience inside may leave some visitors dizzy, disoriented, or overstimulated due to its intense, full-sensory design.
The museum describes the attraction as an “omni-sensory ecosystem,” where visuals, sounds and even scents change in real time based on visitor movement.
The centerpiece is the sprawling “Data Pavilion,” where projections race across floors and walls simultaneously, enveloping guests in a torrent of rapidly evolving imagery.
The experience is powered by a dizzying stack of Google technology, including Gemini AI systems, diffusion models, generative adversarial networks and Google Cloud infrastructure.
But the immersive design may not be for everyone.
A reporter for the LAist who got an early preview described the experience as ‘dizzying’ while other vistors have described feeling as though they were physically moving even while standing still, a sensation created by the overwhelming visual intensity surrounding them.
The museum is the culmination of nearly a decade of collaboration between Google and digital artist Refik Anadol, a partnership that began in 2016 and expanded into increasingly ambitious AI art projects, including visualizations of quantum computing data and large-scale installations at Google’s Mountain View campus.