Los Angeles: The sounds of macaws, the smell of damp earth after the rain, and swirls of color transport visitors from a Los Angeles museum to the heart of the Amazon rainforest, an AI version of it.
The data collected from these visitors – their movement, heart rate, and even skin temperature – is fed into a computer that creates an immersive display using a network of sensors, including one on the ticket holder’s wrist.
Mechanical Dream: Rainforest Dataland is the first exhibition at the new museum in the heart of America’s second-largest city, the brainchild of Refik Anadolu and Efsun Erkilić. Its 10 million lines of code use 1.5 billion pixels to achieve the animation.
Anadolu said her inspiration came from a visit to the Brazilian Amazon, a place everyone should experience.
“But I don’t think we should all go to the rainforest,” he told AFP.
“The question was: Can the rainforest come to us? Can we still connect, feel special, respect and love nature, and learn about nature?”
Sensors mounted on the walls track visitors’ movements, and visitors wear medical-grade watch-like devices to monitor their emotions and heart rates as they interact with the models. You will also carry a portable scent diffuser with you during the experience.
This model uses billions of images and data points to create a constantly evolving experience.
It’s as if the system is “dreaming,” Erkilich explained.
“It’s always moving because it’s collecting data. As soon as you build one structure, it affects the overall storytelling as well,” he said.
“It’s not coming from a scientific place, it’s coming from a more poetic place. The machine itself is trying to reconstruct reality based on data points. It’s like it’s trying to collect all the little bits and dots and construct reality itself.”
At the end of the experience, visitors can sample flavored chocolates produced by the models and print T-shirts and paintings resulting from the model interactions.
These are meant to be tangible mementoes of Dataland’s ephemeral dreams.
“The system forgets you. That’s the beauty of the system,” Anadolu says. –AFP
