Announcing DATALAND’s AI Artist Residency Cohort

Announcing DATALAND’s AI Artist Residency

In 2016, Google invited a small group of artists to join the first cohort of its Artists and Machine Intelligence program. At the time, generative AI was not yet a global headline and there was no established path for artists who wanted to work with machine learning—no tools built for creative practice, no community of peers, no institutions ready to show the work. Refik Anadol was among that inaugural cohort, and the residency went on to meaningfully shape the trajectory of his artistic practice.

By that point, Refik had already been working with data in public space, translating wind patterns, temperature, and urban signals into paintings and sculptures. Over the course of the residency he began asking the question: if a machine can learn, can it also dream? Can it hallucinate? These questions led to the development of Archive Dreaming, Refik’s first project to utilize AI as a collaborative tool in his artistic practice. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s The Library of Babel, he trained a neural network with images of 1,700,000 documents from SALT Research in Istanbul and allowed it to “dream” of unexpected correlations among documents in the installation’s idle moments. The questions Refik began exploring during the residency would go on to remain at the center of his artistic practice.

Ten years later, DATALAND opens its doors to four artists exploring the new possibilities AI can unlock across their practices, creative inquiries, and forms of expression.

Building the Conditions for New Art

From the beginning, DATALAND was imagined as more than a museum. It is a living platform where artists, researchers, scientists, engineers, architects, and technologists come together to ask questions that no single discipline can answer alone and help guide a shared cultural space in the age of machine intelligence. Because DATALAND belongs to a creative community that is still taking shape, the institution must help sustain the conditions that make the work possible.

“One of the dreams behind DATALAND has always been to create more than a museum," says Refik Anadol, Co-Founder and Artistic Director. “This residency reflects that vision by creating space for experimentation, interdisciplinary dialogue, and bold artistic inquiry. I hope it becomes a place where artists discover new ways of imagining the future while asking questions that technology alone cannot answer.”

The reality is that AI remains one of the most demanding artistic media to work with. Training models requires specialized infrastructure, access to computing resources, interdisciplinary collaboration, and technical expertise that are simply unavailable to many artists.

The residency was created to help close that gap.

Each resident receives $25,000 in project support, mentorship from Refik Anadol Studio, one-on-one sessions with Refik, access to Google Cloud technologies, DATALAND's computational infrastructure, and the Large Nature Model (LNM), our open-access AI model trained exclusively on permission-based ecological datasets developed in collaboration with leading scientific and cultural institutions.

"The residency is designed to give artists both the freedom to experiment and the support of a thoughtful community," says Efsun Erkilic, Co-Founder. "Together with Google Arts & Culture, we wanted to create an environment where responsible innovation could flourish. We hope the relationships formed through this program continue well beyond the residency itself."

Meet the Jury

More than five hundred artists applied from across disciplines such as visual art, architecture, performance, creative technology, and beyond.

Applications were reviewed first by DATALAND and Refik Anadol Studio leadership, then deliberated by a jury of practitioners, academics, and technology leaders:

Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, and founding Director of Research and Development, Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA)

Nora Khan, Writer, Critic, and Curator

Gabriel Kozlowski, Architect, Curator, and Research Associate, MIT School of Architecture and Planning; Founding Partner of POLES – Political Ecology of Space

Mira Lane, Vice President, Technology & Society, Google

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London

Freya Salway, Head of the Lab, Google Arts & Culture

Amit Sood, Vice President and Founder of Google Arts & Culture

Together, they selected artists whose practices demonstrate exceptional conceptual rigor, artistic vision, and a willingness to expand the possibilities of AI as a cultural medium.

Meet the Residents

This year's residents represent four remarkably different approaches to contemporary practice:

What Comes Next

The residency began in June and continues through December 2026. Over the six months, each artist will develop a new body of work in dialogue with Refik Anadol Studio, drawing upon DATALAND's technological resources while pursuing their own independent artistic vision.

Through this residency, we aim to offer space, support, and visibility to artists engaging artificial intelligence as both a medium and a subject, and to create a platform for new questions, ideas, and forms of expression to emerge. We hope their work will expand the possibilities of collaboration between human creativity and machine intelligence, inspiring new ways of imagining what we might create together.

Ten years ago, one residency helped launch a set of questions that eventually became DATALAND. We hope this residency becomes the beginning of many more.