The museum of the Spanish visual artist Salvador Dalí in St. Petersburg, Florida, receives visitors through a digital persona of the artist, despite his death in 1989. This presence is achieved through artificial intelligence technology, which allows visitors to interact with the persona, ask questions, and take photos with it.
From Archive to Digital Persona
The "Dalí Lives Through AI" experience appeared in the museum in 2019, where the digital persona was built using machine learning and digital animation technologies. The project relied on more than a thousand hours of archival materials and about six thousand images and frames from films to document the artist's features, movements, and way of speaking.
The system generates new scenes of Dalí that did not occur during his lifetime, showing him on full-size screens speaking about his life and works. In 2024, the museum added the "Ask Dalí" experience, which allows visitors to ask questions using language models and materials derived from his writings and archival audio recordings.
From Artist to Digital Image
A material published by the University of Minnesota Press website on Friday by researcher David Bering-Burton indicates that this experience differs from the revival of characters in cinema. The system relies on the archive as training material to produce new images, movements, and speech, without an actor in front of the camera.
The researcher raises questions about the use of artists' archives after their departure, and the transformation of their works into material that can be reassembled in new contexts. One of the most prominent elements of the experience is allowing the visitor to take a "selfie" with Dalí, where the digital persona appears holding a virtual phone and mimicking the process of taking a photo.
The Artist in Brief
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) was a Spanish visual artist considered one of the most prominent pioneers of the Surrealist school in the 20th century. He was famous for his works that blend imagination, dreams, and reality, and his most famous painting is "The Persistence of Memory." His activity was not limited to painting; he also worked in sculpture, design, and cinema, leaving a prominent mark on modern art.
Source: Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA)
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