Customers visiting a Los Angeles museum will be able to hear the sounds of macaws, smell wet earth after the rain and be greeted with a swirl of colours, all of which will take them to the heart of the Amazon rainforest, if not to its heart, then to its AI heart.
Data collected from those visitors — their movements, their heartbeats and even the temperature of their skin — will feed the computer that is creating the immersive display, using a network of sensors, including those on the wrists of ticket-holders.
With 10 million lines of code controlling the animation, “Machine Dreams: Rainforest” is the first-of-its-kind exhibit at Dataland, a new museum located in the second-largest city in the U.S. that was conceived by Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkilic.
Wishing everyone a chance to visit the Brazilian Amazon, he was inspired by the experience there.
“However, I think we shouldn’t all go to the rainforest,” he said to AFP.
The questions that arose were, ” Can the rainforest come to us?” Is it possible to connect, feel special, to respect and love nature, to learn about it, still?
Visitors’ movements will be tracked using wall-mounted sensors, and visitors will wear a medical-grade watch-like device that will track their emotions and heart rate to interact with the model. They will also have a compact scent diffuser to take with them during the experience.
The model will generate billions of images and datapoints to produce an ever-changing experience.
It is as if the system were “dreaming,” Erkilic explained.
“It’s constantly moving because it is collecting data; it’s constructing the structures, but it’s also impacting the overall story,” he said.
It’s not coming from a scientific place, but from something poetic: “It’s coming from more of the little bits and dots and trying to recreate the reality itself with the machine.”
Visitors can taste the chocolate that is flavoured by the model, or print T-shirts and paintings based on their interaction with the model, at the end of the experience.
These are to be physical mementoes of the never-to-be-real-met in Dataland.
“The system forgets you; that’s its beauty,” Anadol says.
Dataland is open to the public from 20th June.
