Client Project: Dataland Arrives
The museum dedicated to AI and data-visualization arts is announcing that its doors will open in to the public soon.
It is finally coming. Three and a half years after joining forces with Refik Anadol Studio,1 the pieces are in place to welcome the general public to experience Dataland.2 The first museum dedicated to AI and data-visualization arts. For the inaugural exhibition Machine Dreams: Rainforest, “visitors open up a dialog between human presence and the memories of Earth.” Powered by the studio’s Large Nature Model, a custom AI model trained on one of the largest collections of data from the natural world.3 The Large Nature Model powers the art. And Dataland’s members will power the museum. Today I am going to talk about the memberships for Dataland and a little of what went into the process.
What goes into a museum membership?
Hopefully when you look at the tiers above, it is easy to discern the tiers. It is a sliding scale in price and in benefits. But, how did we come to this specifically? During my time at NEW INC, I learned a bit from meeting museum operators.4 Working on Dataland opened up my eyes further. My colleagues at Constellation Immersive started by putting together a survey of what types of benefits currently exist.5 This ranged from membership offerings of established museum to more avant-garde ticketed experiences. Numerous meetings over the years were held to discuss, at a high level or put another way: from the consumer’s perspective, what “felt right”. A natural compliment emerged of different motivations: maximize memberships and offer a truly unique experience.
To maximize memberships may sound terse, but the reality for a new, and particularly small, institution like Dataland is that memberships are vital. Operationally, memberships account for a majority of stable revenue. Beyond monetary incentives, having a strong membership group establishes a clear value proposition. And a museum’s members can guide what that value proposition ultimately becomes. How it operates and what should be on display. The museum serves the community and a clear membership group clarifies this.
To offer a truly unique experience starts with the exhibition, right? It can. But, it does not always. The presentation of tickets and memberships convey expectations for a visitor. By presenting benefits, a museum frames what kind of experience lies ahead. Everything from the price, through the member benefits, to the names frame the experience. Is this a high brow or casual experience? Is there one gallery or many and how many exhibitions are there? The membership can begin to communicate this. From the meetings I was in, it was clear that the founders appreciate an agency from their audience. They encourage participation and imagine that memberships with a bit of whimsy can foster this.
Balancing these two competing motivations brought us to: Explorer, Dreamer, and Pioneer memberships. Practically speaking, Explorer is your typical individual annual museum membership. Dreamer has perks that make it a good value for a household. Lastly, Pioneer is a uniquely exclusive tier for collectors, offering both access and art objects. That is the vision behind the memberships. To fill out each tiers’ offerings, however, required more back-and-forth. This time that dialog occurred with our ticketing vendor. The team had to come together to balance how we could make good on each benefit. The discounts and Member Access, for instance, are conveyed and managed by the ticketing vendor. We worked with them to define what was possible. For other items, like Priority Gallery Entry, we defined commonsense solutions like marking tickets different colors for employees to easily verify a visitor’s priority. Each benefit requires an accord among the systems we employ and operate. We had the vision and over time we chiseled away at potential benefits. The chart above is the result.
It took almost the entire three and a half years to come up with the tiers and benefits. The implementation, on the other hand, took a couple of months. While the chart may look straightforward, the systems in place to convey the chart are more complex. We rely on numerous vendors in order to achieve the membership experience. A lot of my job in the context of memberships, has been to make sure that these systems are sharing just enough. What does “just enough” mean? It comes from Principle of Least Privilege or PoLP.6 In cybersecurity circles, PoLP is a methodology of sharing that reduces a potential attack surfaces. This is done by granting a service the minimum permissions necessary to perform a job. In the case of Dataland, we give the minimum information necessary for a vendor to perform its job. It is in part for security reasons, but it is also in part for modularity. If we can reduce the inputs necessary for a module to work, then we can change that module down the road with minimal impact to the system as a whole. My hope is that this “just enough” method serves the museum well as it matures, like supporting languages other than English.
So, that is a look on how we landed on memberships for Dataland. I hope it has piqued your interest in Dataland or its memberships. It certainly has been a challenging puzzle to work on over the years. As always, feedback is greatly appreciated.
—Jono
Refik Anadol Studio. 2026. https://refikanadolstudio.com/
Dataland. 2026. https://dataland.art/
Large Nature Model. 2024. https://dataland.art/about/large-nature-model
Constellation Immersive. 2026. https://constellationimmersive.com/
Principle of Least Privilege. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege