Salvador Dalí’s 120th Birthday Celebrated with Surreal AI Experience at Dali Museum

As the art world prepares to mark what would have been Salvador Dalí’s 120th birthday on May 11th, the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida has unveiled a groundbreaking new exhibit that allows visitors to converse with a lifelike AI recreation of the legendary Spanish painter himself.

Inspired by Dalí’s iconic 1936 sculpture “Lobster Telephone”, the “Ask Dalí” experience invites museumgoers to pick up a retro telephone and pose questions to an AI system trained on the artist’s own writings and audio recordings. The result is a series of uncannily Dalí-esque responses, channeling his distinctive surrealist style, flamboyant personality and impish sense of humor.

“In the labyrinth of the imagination that unfurls within the Dalí Museum of St. Petersburg, one must seek the melting clocks in The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, where time drips like a dream refusing to be contained,” the AI told museum director Hank Hine during a demonstration, in a sentence that could have been lifted straight from the artist’s own lips.

Dalí, of course, was a pioneer of the Surrealist movement, which sought to revolutionize human experience by balancing reason with the power of the unconscious mind and dreams. His iconic paintings like “The Persistence of Memory” and “Swans Reflecting Elephants” offered up strange, unsettling juxtapositions that challenged the viewer’s perceptions of reality.

The “Ask Dalí” exhibit builds on the museum’s previous experiments with AI, including a 2019 installation called “Dalí Lives” which brought the artist’s persona to life on screens throughout the building. But this latest project, created by advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners, represents a significant leap forward in terms of the technology’s ability to engage in freeform conversation.

“Dalí was fascinated by the latest tools and technologies of his era and continually explored various artistic media,” notes GS&P co-founder Jeff Goodby. “Ask Dalí provides a delightful new way to interact with machine-learning technology. Dalí’s poetic writings, in an imaginative style all his own, are the basis of the training, providing dynamic and unpredictable answers to visitors’ questions.”

As the art world continues to grapple with the implications of AI, the Dali Museum’s latest offering serves as a timely reminder of the potential for technology to enhance and expand our engagement with the creative genius of the past. In an age of increasing automation, it seems fitting that one of the 20th century’s most innovative and visionary artists should be resurrected in this most modern of forms.