If you’ve ever wanted to meet Salvador Dali, get yourself to St. Petersburg, Florida on May 11. That date is significant for two reasons: one, a new exhibit called “Dali Lives” opens at The Dali Museum, and two, Dali himself will be welcoming visitors into the museum with some help from artificial intelligence technology.
According to Lonely Planet, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, an advertising agency based in San Francisco, helped pull together all of the things needed to create an AI version of the artist. The lifelike projection called for quite a bit of work, namely tons of archival footage, interviews, and quotes to help feed the vocal cues to an algorithm that would help the projection stream sentences in the same voice as Dali himself and a model lookalike to base the projection on. The result is eerie: Something Dali would have dreamed up in one of his painted universes.
In fact, part of the museum’s excitement around the project is their sturdy belief that Dali would have loved to see himself reimagined in this way: “Dalí was prophetic in many ways and understood his historical importance,” Dr. Hank Hine, executive director of The Dalí, shared in a public statement about the new introduction. “He wrote: ‘if someday I may die, though it is unlikely, I hope the people in the cafes will say, ‘Dalí has died, but not entirely.’ This technology lets visitors experience his bigger-than-life personality in addition to our unparalleled collection of his works.”
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The Dali Museum houses more than 2,000 masterpieces from the artist, so the new virtual greeter is only an added bonus to an already fruitful tourist attraction. For more information on the museum, head to The Dali Museum website.
