“Dalí Lives”Courtesy of the Dalí Museum.
We love dead celebrities – so much so that it’s often difficult for us to let them rest in peace. It’s why Paris’ authorities had to put an easily wiped barrier up to stop people from kissing Oscar Wild’s grave, why “Elvis” still marries people in Vegas, and why eight years after her death, Amy Winehouse is touring via hologram this fall. But the Salvador Dalí museum in Petersburg, Florida has taken things a step further: they resurrected the father of surrealism with artificial intelligence.
For Dali Lives, opening this April, the museum has fed hundreds of interviews and quotes from Salvador Dalí into machine learning software designed by San Francisco tech company, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, to recreate the surrealist master’s mind. To get his look and expressions just right, GS&P combined archival footage and clips of a lookalike actor with the same general physical characteristics of Dalí’s body. The AI fixes Dalí’s likeness over the actor’s face and expressions.
Thankfully, Dalí will only be coming back on two-dimensional screens. While scientists have made huge advances in robotics, they have yet to get past the uncanny valley to make humanoids less creepy. Case-in-point, the anatomically correct Scarlett Johansson robot created by a robotics’ enthusiast in Hong Kong, who just really liked the way she looked. But animatronic robot lookalikes have been creepy since at least the ’80s when Japanese display artist, Shunichi Mizuno, created a winking Marilyn Monroe.
Even when celebrity robotic reproductions are not overtly sexual, there is always the question of whether or not the celebrity would be OK with what this version of themselves, which they have no control over, is doing. Holograms of entertainer’s past performances have a level of third-party authorship, because the person is inserted into a new context. Sometimes this can be sweet, like when Natalie Cole performed virtual duets with her dead jazz legend father, Nat King Cole, but other times it can be grotesque. For instance, the late pop star, Prince, was very vocal about his distaste for posthumous performances in a 1998 interview with Guitar World when asked about the possibility of performing with a hologram of deceased jazz pianist, Duke Ellington. “That’s the most demonic thing imaginable. Everything is as it is, and it should be. If I was meant to jam with Duke Ellington, we would have lived in the same age. That whole virtual reality thing… it really is demonic. And I am not a demon,” he said. This sentiment was reportedly factored in to the decision not to use a Prince hologram in a Justin Timberlake performance at the 2018 Super Bowl.
The surrealist master, on the other hand, seemed a little more open to the idea of being brought back from the dead in a new form. “Dalí was prophetic in many ways and understood his historical importance,” says Dr. Hank Hine, executive director at The Dalí in a statement. “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.”
In anticipation of the April opening, check out this preview, which was released this week on the thirtieth anniversary of the artist’s death.