Dataland opened June 20, 2026. In the intervening six weeks since opening, the interest has been strong. Reviews are many and fairly positive. We have sold over 20,000 tickets. I have posted steadily over the years about my contributions to Dataland.1 It aligns strongly with my background and values. But, I will be honest: there were times when I was not sure if the museum was going to happen. Together with Refik Anadol Studio (the creative force for Dataland) and others, we built a lot of things over the last four years in service of the museum and its vision: can art feel you back?2 Typically, I walk you through a project based on the process I take. For Dataland, I feel like it is better suited to show you as much as possible: the things that we built; that are live; that are working for the museum. Below are a series of videos and images I made. For each one, I will explain a bit of the design and a bit of the technology to give you a survey of this collaboration.
Website Content Management System
The main pillar of the website is our content management system (CMS). It allows for Dataland staff members to create pages made up of different styled modules. It drives our homepage, about, exhibitions, and memberships among most pages on the website. In the above video there are two screen captures. On the left is the website from a desktop computer. On the right is roughly the same content viewed from a smartphone. The homepage, about, exhibitions, and memberships pages show off most of the modules that I co-created with Use All Five. The modules vary from captivating video elements with titles and call to actions to simple text blocks. In all there are 35 custom made modules that create the look and feel of the Dataland website.
Blog and Incidentals
The blog and incidentals also run through the CMS. To make the blog distinct from other pages it has two parts: the feed and the post. The feed is a descending chronological three column list: the date of the post, the video thumbnail, and the title. The post is a four column grid where different modules inhabit different columns. Above the fold has the title and thumbnail split in two columns. Post date, author, and share links below it take up 1 by 1 by 2 columns. Blog posts are text heavy. The primary text module sits two of the four columns wide centered on the page. Images, carousels, and other media spread themselves across the 4 columns in ways the author can decide. On mobile the columns collapse into a single column.
The incidentals, Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Career pages, etc., all live like individual blog posts: two columns centered on the page. It is a workflow that is easy enough for team members to jump in and make edits to while still evoking the larger grid system and general design ethos of Dataland.
Forms Integration
Throughout the last year, the team has often relied on forms for gauging specific interests. We started with a general mailing list module. This was effective in getting our mailing list to over 50,000 subscribers since the website first published in 2023. However, the current forms integration is slightly more sophisticated. Any form that is created in our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform is automatically hosted in the official Dataland website. This adds validity to Refik’s sensitive collectors and investors when we need them to fill out something. It also expands our ability to cater to you and your interests regarding the museum. Above, we have a waiting list form up and running for those interested to know when scents are available to purchase in the Design Archive (Dataland’s equivalent to the gift shop).
Microsite Webpages
Of course the museum that is dedicated to AI arts is interested in hosting AI generated, sometimes referred to as “vibecoded”, content. The rest of this paragraph is more technology than design. The Dataland site is a containerized Next.js application. One of the strength’s of Next.js is its routing system. By simply placing files in specific folder architectures, you can write an API endpoint, a server function, or a browser-facing webpage. We customize this routing structure extensively. We run a kind of middleware that allows for single pages to be routed to any URL we want. This functionality allows any team member who generates something with AI to simply upload the contents of that page and put it up on our site. It is completely siloed from the rest of the CMS, content, or server scripts. Above we have the Data Scent page hosted as a microsite its main call-to-action is a button that takes you to the form described in the previous section.
Tickets and Orders
Dataland has two ticketing purchase paths. First, there is the naked /tickets route. This is the primary way the general public can purchase tickets. It has an embedded calendar widget provided by TickX. Their widget features a robust user journey to see available time slots, purchase tickets, and add ons to your order. The second route, like the previous Forms Integration section, shows a calendar and available time slots for a specific exhibition or event. At the moment, Dataland only has one exhibition, but it is set up to handle one off events like concerts, lectures (in person or remote), private events, and simultaneous exhibitions. An example one we ran was for members to preview the museum before it was open. The member discounts are also available through this purchase path. If you are a member, you can find that special link on your profile page after signing in. The link is called “Reserve member tickets”.
Once you have purchased a ticket, you will be directed to the order page. This page includes the details of your booking like the exhibition name, date, and time. It also has the tickets. Dataland uses QR codes to handle check in. The QR code is also your key to get biosensing devices in the museum. The QR codes can be downloaded to your Apple or Google Wallet. You can also share each ticket individually with the members of your party. You will notice the QR codes are initially obscured. This is because Dataland requires a waiver to be signed prior to entry and issuance of any devices. It is a UI hook we are still ironing out details for. Lastly, the order page is also the place where you can self rebook your tickets and upgrade ticket types. This page is a workhorse.
Web3 Backed Collections
In addition to the art that you can experience in the museum, Dataland has commissioned two digital collections of art so far. The first, Biome Lumina, is an edition of 1,000 unique NFTs. They take the form of Flora, Fauna, and Fungi; biomes from the rainforest theme of the first exhibition. They also take different literal forms. Each NFT comes as an image, a source video, an artistic depiction of the source video, an interactive WebGL webpage, and a physical archival print. Anyone can see the image and videos of the NFT on the collections page. But, only an owner who creates a Dataland user account and links their Web3 wallet can experience the interactive version.
Qualia is the second collection. It is an edition of 300 unique physical paintings. Each painting is made with the collector’s session data from visiting the museum. A robot arm synthesizes your position, heart-rate, and temperature into pigment colors that it applies to a physical canvas with a real paintbrush. The robot sits in the museum’s Design Archive and salutes visitors as they leave. For more information on this exclusive collection visit the collection page.
The website supports each collection by hooking into OpenSea, a platform for viewing, purchasing, and trading NFTs on blockchains. We get the publicly available information of each NFT through OpenSea and then enhance it with specific data that is stored on our site. For instance, you can view all 1,000 Biome Luminas on our webpage and then filter or browse them through the unique attributes and hex colors that make up each image (pictured above).
User Profiles or My.Dataland
Anyone can sign up for a Dataland account. It houses your subscriptions and memberships if you have any. You can claim the data generated by your visit to the museum with your account. So, it also shows your visits to the museum. It is the jumping off point to access our digital experience: Living Encyclopedia (a website that allows you to interact with the AI model that generates nature content in the museum). You can connect your ethereum backed wallet and interact with Biome Luminas you own. Of all the sections of the website, this is the most nascent. Not because it is the newest section. But, because it holds the most potential. When Refik and I first spoke, his vision was “to make the digital experience for a museum be more evocative of the actual in person experience”. This drew me in. My.Dataland is really the main place I tried to make good on that vision. When you see your past visits, there are data visualizations and statistics about what transpired. The Living Encyclopedia is an AI chat experience comparable to ChatGPT or Claude, just focused on the natural world. These are jumping off points for compelling digital experiences.
In the Museum
We all think of a website that we access through our computer or smartphone’s web browser. The Dataland website is no different in that regard. However, it also functions as a surface for different kiosks in the museum. Right now there are three such kiosks: a ticketing kiosk, a merchandise kiosk, and a print job display. The ticketing kiosks allows staff and soon the public to reserve and print tickets for day of time slots. The merchandise kiosks are the bookend of Dataland. Here you can scan your Data.Token, a physical NFC enabled paper disc given to every visitor when they checkout. You then can review the data you generated during your visit to the museum. The above video shows three different users going through that kiosk experience. Lastly, you can use that data to create custom designs and print them on t-shirts. The print job display, shows the queue for t-shirts ordered on the kiosks. We not only print the t-shirts on demand, but can turnaround a job in about 10 minutes if you are open to waiting. For those in a rush we also offer free shipping within the United States on the custom shirts.
This portion of the website reminds me of my time at Google. There on the Data Arts Team, I focused on web-based experiences that could jump out of what we typically thought of for a website. It is why a project like Unnumbered Sparks exists: projection mapping art running through Google Chrome during the TED Conference.3 In a way, the promise of being able to leverage websites to do things that are not websites is more attainable than ever. The kiosks in Dataland are proof.
Internal Staff Portals
Finally, there are three different websites for our staff to access: Dataland content pages, Dataland records, and back of house print jobs. These sites are designed only in so much as our staff are able to do what they need to do. There are more staff-only portals that our team needs to access in order to get the information they need. The three I included: drive what you see on the website and I had some hand in building, designing, or customizing them in some way. Dataland content pages are primarily managed through an open source authoring tool called Wagtail. The records management is a custom Django admin interface. The back of house print jobs is a custom AppEngine dashboard for displaying full resolution imagery and Shopify order status.
In addition to the staff portals there are other internal services for cross-function data sharing. The Dataland CMS has 140 private key enabled API endpoints allowing for our AI agent, mobile apps, and Living Encyclopedia to be treated like third party accessors of data and allowing users to authenticate into these experiences using their Dataland account. We are running about 60 Cloud Run Services and eight unique AppEngine Services. In all, these run off of carbon neutral data centers in Oregon.
Recounting the different pages and features of the Dataland website has brought a lot of joy. Yes, I am happy to be able to share what I have been working on for so long. Yes, I am proud of what the team has been able to accomplish. Yes, I am relieved that the museum is open and functioning. Supporting the build out of a museum where the art feels you back, is an exercise in jumping into unknown territory. Now I can invite you to jump into that unknown too because it really exists: Tuesday through Sunday at 100 South Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles.
–Jono
All newsletter posts about Dataland. https://jonofyi.substack.com/t/dataland.
At the Ambitious New A.I Museum, You Feel the Art, and It Feels You Right Back. Frank Rose. 2026. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/arts/design/dataland-ai-museum-los-angeles-art-artificial-intelligence.html.
Unnumbered Sparks. 2014. Vancouver, Canada. https://www.jono.fyi/Unnumbered-Sparks.