2026 Art + Technology Lab Grant Recipients Draft

Tanya Aguiñiga will create a network of handwoven sculptural beacons along the Los Angeles River that collect and communicate data about the river’s movement and environmental conditions. Combining traditional craft with sensing and communication technologies, the project will explore the river as an interconnected ecological, cultural, and technological system. Aguiñiga’s project is called The River Loom.

In a cross-institutional collaboration between DATALAND and LACMA, Refik Anadol and Christina Moushoul will transform the museum’s campus into an interactive soundscape, where visitors’ movements through the grounds generate an evolving composition drawn from recordings of California’s diverse natural environments. Their project, Latent Terrain, runs on the Large Nature Model, an ethical AI system developed at DATALAND.

Chloe Bensahel will investigate the historical and material connections between textile craft and artificial intelligence, exploring how traditional forms of knowledge and making might inform contemporary approaches to machine learning. Through archival research, technical experimentation, and lacemaking, Bensahel will consider the cultural assumptions and biases embedded in ideas of intelligence. Bensahel’s project is called Neural Networks (Instruments of Darkness).

Paul Pfeiffer will use Los Angeles’s preparations for the 2028 Olympic Games as a framework for exploring the technologies and media systems that shape mass spectatorship. Through speculative architectural models that radically expand the scale of two iconic Los Angeles stadiums, as well as observational filmmaking centering the broadcast infrastructures around the games, Pfeiffer will examine the increasingly networked nature of audiences and the contemporary attention economy. Pfeiffer’s project is called Vitruvian Figure (Olympia).