Celebrating what would have been the 115th birthday of celebrated artist Salvador Dali, The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida has introduced “Dali Lives”, on his birthday of May 11th.
The 3 Michelin Star Dali Museum is located in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida and features more than 2,000 works comprising 100 oil paintings, over 100 watercolors and drawings and 1,300 prints, photographs, sculptures and objets d’ art. The building is made of 1,062 triangular-shaped glass panels and is the only structure of its kind in North America.
This life sized interactive Artificial Intelligence reimagines Salvatore Dali in the present day, complete with a series of interactions with museum guests, and was inspired by Dali himself.
The project came to fruition with a partnership with San Francisco-based creative company Goodby Silverstein & Partners, sorting through hundreds of interviews, letters, quotes and existing archived footage of Dali. 6,000 frames and over 1,000 hours of machine learning to train an AI algorithm were used to learn the aspects of Dali’s face.
The AI then generated a likeness of Dali, which was imposed on an actor, followed by sound engineering to sync Dali’s actual words with the footage.
The end result: over 45 minutes of footage with 125 videos, able to create thousands of combinations. The charismatic life-sized Dali greets visitors, address present day conditions and even snaps selfies.
“What ‘Dali Lives’ adds is a sense of emotion,” says Dr. Hank Hine, Director of the Dali Museum. “If visitors can empathize with this man as a human being, then they can relate to his works much more directly and much more passionately. It’s a special entry into Dali’s spirit, allowing visitors to engage with the artist in a completely revolutionary way”.
For more information: thedali.org
