As part of his upcoming museum Dataland, which will open in Los Angeles later this year, mixed-media-artist Refik Anadol has released “Living Encyclopedia”, a Large Language Model trained on millions of ethically sourced nature-related images, audio clips, and articles provided by the Smithsonian and London’s Natural History Museum.
Additionally, the studio conducted its own independent sourcing through technologies such as LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and photogrammetry. The idea according to Anadol is to “reimagine the traditional concept of an encyclopedia by transforming static knowledge into an evolving, multi-sensory experience powered by AI.”
To bring the model to life, they collaborated closely with German Generative AI startup Black Forest Labs known for their flagship product, the FLUX.1 suite, that also has been deployed to Elon Musk's Grok chatbot to optimize its image generation capabilities. As Anadol explains on the studio’s website “Living Encyclopedia” contains over 2.6 million images featuring nearly 10,000 species including their scientific names.
A writer of Artnet, who tested the tool, reported that the newly launched platform still contains some errors that have to be worked out: “I tried finding javelinas, Gila monsters, and other animals with no luck. And some appeared taxonomically incorrect, like the Topknot Pigeon being classified as an invertebrate. Though these errors in the Research mode seem massive, the tool could be great with some revision.”
Users can access Living Encyclopedia for a subscription fee of $10 per month and use it for research purposes as well as for their own creative projects.
Living Architecture at Guggenheim Bilbao
Anadol has also been busy preparing his latest exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. His installation "Living Architecture," will run from March to October 2025. It’s an homage to Frank Gehry’s designs and reinterprets the visual language taken from archival materials of the building. Through the use of artificial intelligence, a custom soundscape, and interactive displays Living Architecture explores the relationship between data and the built environment.
