The conceptual roots of Infinity Room trace back to my early fascinations with the California Light and Space movement—artists such as James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and Doug Wheeler who revolutionized how we perceive light as both material and experience. But while they worked with physical light phenomena, I began to imagine data as a new kind of light, one that carries the memories and patterns of our collective digital age.
Infinity Room
10.23.2025
Los Angeles, CA
RAS LAB
Refik Anadol
Infinity Room
When I created the original Infinity Room design at UCLA in 2014, it marked a pivotal moment in my artistic practice—a transition from wall-based "data paintings" to fully immersive "data sculptures." The work emerged from my exploration of the idea that information can become a narrative material capable of transforming architectural space into a living canvas. The question driving me was simple but profound: What happens if there is no corner, no floor, no ceiling, no gravity?
While the mirrored space inevitably invites comparisons to Yayoi Kusama’s iconic Infinity Mirror Rooms, our intentions diverge. Kusama’s work is a brilliant exploration of a psychological infinity, a reflection of an internal, hallucinatory state born from her personal history. My Infinity Room, in contrast, seeks an infinity found in the external universe of our collective data—a portal into our shared, digitized reality as interpreted through the mind of a machine.
The first Infinity Room took physical form in 2015. A 12x12 ft perfect cube, with mirrored walls, ceiling and floors, it used projectors which displayed undulating pulses of black and white imagery, using light as a material and data as a pigment . The infinite reflections created a dissolution of physical boundaries, an attempt to deconstruct the framework of an illusory space and transgress the normal boundaries of the viewing experience. It became a meditation space for the digital age.
In the ten years since its debut, Infinity Room has traveled to 35 cities worldwide and has been experienced by more than 10 million people . Each iteration taught me something new about the relationship between humans and data environments. One key evolution was Infinity Room: Bosphorus, which visualizes real-time weather data from Istanbul, making the invisible forces of a place tangible and poetic. I watched as visitors—from Tokyo to Istanbul, from New York to São Paulo—found their own meanings in these abstract data formations, proving that data, when transformed through artistic interpretation, becomes a universal language of emotion and wonder.
At DATALAND, Infinity Room enters a new era. This iteration embodies the technical and conceptual leaps our studio has made over the past decade.Where the original used generative algorithms, this new incarnation incorporates our decade-long research into what I call "machine hallucinations"—the dreamlike, surreal realities an AI can generate from vast datasets. The Infinity Room at DATALAND incorporates AI-generated scents from our Large Nature Model, which was trained on half a million scent molecules, adding an olfactory dimension that connects data to our most primal sense of memory. Most significantly, it is the first immersive space to use World Models, an advanced type of generative AI that understands the dynamics of real-world physics and spatial properties. This marks a fundamental shift from representation to simulation; we are no longer just showing you a picture of a dream, but inviting you inside a world being coherently imagined in real-time.
This evolution from the 2014 prototype to today's AI-powered environment mirrors my broader artistic journey: from asking what would happen if data could become material to exploring what happens when machines dream of infinite space?. Infinity Room is a laboratory for consciousness, a mirror for the digital sublime, and now, a gateway into the age of machine imagination.
As the poet William Blake once wrote, “if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to [humans] as it is, Infinite.” The Infinity Room offers a first glimpse into the multisensory, perspective-altering experiences awaiting visitors at DATALAND, where each gallery pushes the boundaries of what it means to make the invisible visible, transforming the raw data of our world into spaces of contemplation and beauty.
