With a Little Help From A.I., the Dali Museum Brings the Famed Surrealist to Life

Salvador Dalí wasn't exactly modest. And he’ll tell you so, too, face to face at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. Here , the Spanish surrealist is alive and well, ready to talk to you in person about his art and his processes.

Well, sort of. This Dalí is a reanimated version, brought to life through the magic of artificial intelligence. It’s a newly opened exhibition called "Dali Lives," and it stretches across the entire Dali Museum, which boasts more than 2,000 Dalí works in about 20,000 square feet of exhibit space. Three interactive video panels showing a life-size Dalí, standing 5'8" tall, comprise the exhibit—one at the museum entrance, one on the third floor by the main displays (including Dalí's paintings and sketches, photographs, sculptural objects, two tech-enhanced paintings allowing visitors to put themselves inside the image, and a virtual reality experience of walking through Dalí's 1934 painting "Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus" ), and one in the gift shop on the way out. Each one offers a different experience when you push a doorbell on the panel to get Dalí’s attention.

Salvador Dalí was born in Figueras, Spain , 115 years ago, on May 11, 1904. His parents named him after his brother who died nine months before he was born. He spent much of his childhood on the nearby Pinchot estate, learning about art, and began classes at the local drawing school in 1916. By the mid-1920s, Dalí devoted his life to painting in earnest. Surrealism began to play a heavy role in his work, as he sought to shed the shackles of conventional art, and he settled into his own style in the early '30s. Throughout his life, he created art pieces; worked on scripts with celebrities like Walt Disney, Alfred Hitchcock and the Marx Brothers; designed jewelry; and wrote for newspapers and magazines. Dalí was the first artist to create a video of himself talking and painting (an exercise Bob Ross and others would later take up), and one of the first artists to use holograms in his work— creating a portrait of shock-rocker Alice Cooper in 1973. He died on January 23, 1989.

“Dalí himself was at the forefront of technology and was always experimenting and trying new things,” says Beth Bell, marketing director at the Dali Museum. “We feel obligated to keep that legacy going. We think he would love these types of things. It’s in the spirit of Dalí himself.”

The museum first opened in 1982, when A. Reynolds and Eleanor Morse—friends of Salvador and Gala Dalí—decided to donate their extensive Dalí collection. St. Petersburg received it because the city, as opposed to other museums and universities, was willing to keep the entire collection intact—a stipulation of the donors. The museum moved into a new building in 2011, one Dalí would likely be proud of: it's a huge concrete block with a 75-foot-tall bubble made up of 1,062 triangular pieces of glass bulging out of its side. Outside, a garden infuses math and nature—Dalí appreciated the neatness of mathematics. Inside, there's a helical staircase, paying homage to Dalí's obsession with spirals.

In the first of the "Dali Lives" screens, at the front of the museum, Dali comes to welcome you: “This morning you hear the true story of Dali and his art, and you see the greatest paintings you have ever seen,” he says after he sashays to the screen from where he was pacing in the background. “Modesty is not my specialty.” This first interaction with Dali changes based on the day and the weather, prompting different lines of conversation between the visitor and the artist.

For the second panel, on the third floor, Dalí is painting in the background. Ring the doorbell and he’ll get up and come talk about his work. This is the meat of the exhibit. There’s about 45 minutes of new Dalí footage contained in this panel, with different segments prompted by the doorbell ring. He’ll talk about his paintings , his wife Gala, his brother who died before he was born (“I wish to prove to myself I am not le dead brother, but le living one”), and his personality, noting, “The only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad.” After chatting with Dalí, visitors can find the paintings he speaks about on display, seeing them from a more informed viewpoint.

In the third panel interaction in the gift shop, Dalí bids you farewell—but not without taking a photo first. He thanks you for visiting, invites you back, and calls you closer to take a selfie together on his virtual cell phone. Then he’ll ooh and aah over the photo, and text it to you. At the end of the interaction, he gives a signature goodbye, saying, “Kiss you, bye-bye!”

The most stunning thing about "Dali Lives" is that you’re interacting with a version of the artist himself. It looks like Dalí, it sounds like Dalí, it is Dalí. The museum worked together with the San Francisco advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners to accomplish this, feeding hundreds of news interviews (both written and video), quotes from his autobiography and other written works, and archival video footage into an artificial intelligence system to recreate the artist. That 45 minutes of new footage—with 190,512 possible video combinations—is created from more than 6,000 frames of existing Dalí video and more than 1,000 hours of A.I. learning.

Once all the material was gathered and the A.I. system learned the intricacies of Dalí’s movements and expressions, the museum and GS&P worked together with an actor with the same body type as Dalí and a voice actor. The voice actor recorded all the scripts, which were then sent to the body actor, who acted along with the scripts—then the video footage was sent back to the voice actor to re-record any words that didn’t look perfect, and the A.I. superimposed Dalí’s face over the body actor’s face. The scripts and physical movements were very specific to what the A.I. system understood.

“The learning process to get it right was interesting,” says Severin Sauliere, interactive producer at GS&P. “We had to tell the actor what kind of movements to make. If he moved in the wrong way, the A.I. wouldn’t know how to interpret it.”

The result was a living, moving version of Dalí ready to converse with anyone who wants to talk. He can't hear you to respond to your questions directly, but the scripts are extensive and cover most questions that would naturally flow so it gives the illusion of real-time interaction. In total, it took about a year to take the exhibit from conception to implementation—and early tests of the technology show that the wait was worth it.

“Some people have cried,” says Hank Hine, executive director at the Dali Museum. “Just the fact that someone has been resurrected, it’s pretty amazing. It has this spiritual impact. If you can see Dalí come alive, then why not believe in resurrection, eternity and your own immortality—and the immortality of those you love. It’s very uplifting.”

"Dali Lives" is on display at the Dali Museum through June 15, 2022.

Ten Exquisite Creatures That Once Roamed the Earth

Over 99 percent of all species that have ever existed are extinct. Some are celebrated, like the ferociously famous dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex . Others, like an ancient set of stacked cones called Cloudina , are more obscure. But as life has continued spinning off more “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” extinction has acted as the flipside to evolution as our planet’s biota continually reshapes itself.

John Whitfield’s Lost Animals: Extinct, Endangered, and Rediscovered Species from Smithsonian Books is a tribute to the vast menagerie of long-gone creatures, from pancake-like organisms that seem to defy classification to the endangered Bermuda petrel, a bird that may soon join Whitfield’s list. From this gorgeously illustrated compendium, here are ten creatures to be found on its pages, many of which are unlike any species alive today.

More than 560 million years ago, in the days of Dickinsonia , animal life was new. And strange. In life, Whitfield writes, Dickinsonia resembles “a frilly rug” that could reach over four feet across. These creatures were also successful, given how often they’re found among Australia’s Ediacara Hills. But what were they? A few clues—such as preserved remnants of biological compounds—indicate that Dickinsonia was indeed an early animal, but scientists are still scratching their heads as to where this ridged pancake fits in the Tree of Life.

At first glance, Pikaia might seem like little more than a prehistoric squiggle. The tiny animal, shorter than your pinkie, might not appear to be much more than a tube with a dark streak running along its back. But that streak is important—it’s a notochord, or a precursor of our spinal column that marks Pikaia as one of the earliest relatives of vertebrates. “ Pikaia had a fin on its back and could probably swim by flexing its body like an eel,” Whitfield writes, which would have allowed our ancient relative to swim away from the more numerous invertebrates with grasping limbs and compound eyes that dominated the seas 508 million years ago.

When Opabinia was first revealed to paleontologists at a scientific conference, Whitfield writes, the “audience burst out laughing.” What other reaction could there be to a tiny creature with a segmented body of plates, five eyes on mushroom-like stalks, and a proboscis ending in a kind of claw? This animal, an ancient and strange relative of today’s arthropods, was certainly one of the odder inhabitants of the 508 million-year-old Burgess Shale. In fact, paleontologists still puzzle over how this animal lived. Perhaps the position of the hose-like appendage beneath the body, Whitfield speculates, indicates that Opabinia “must have eaten like an elephant snacking on peanuts.”

Imagine a great white shark with a staple remover for a mouth and you have some idea of what Dunkleosteus looked like. During its heyday, about 420 million years ago, this armored fish was among the biggest and fiercest meat-eaters in the seas. Instead of chomping with teeth, like sharks, this predator sliced through other armored fish with immense jaws made of sharpened bony plates. Based on calculations of the animal’s bite, Whitfield notes, Dunkleosteus could have bit down on prey with a bite exerting over 1,100 pounds of force.

Getting buzzed by big dragonflies is a common summertime experience. Now imagine the same happening with a similar insect with a wingspan over two feet across. That’s the size of Meganeura , Whitfield points out, one of the largest members of a dragonfly-like family called griffinflies that thrived around 300 million years ago. Increased oxygen, making up a greater percentage of the atmosphere than today, allowed insects to breath more efficiently and may have even altered air pressure to give flying arthropods like Meganeura a bit more lift with each flap of their wings.

Turtles are an incredibly ancient group of reptiles. The earliest of their kind evolved 260 million years ago, and by 210 million years ago Proganochelys looked very much like its modern counterparts. “ Proganochelys had a fully-developed shell, covering both its back and its belly, as well as a beak,” Whitfield writes. But this ancient reptile still had some traits not seen among its living relatives, like a spiked-covered club tail that would have helped this slow mover defend itself.

During the great Age of Reptiles when dinosaurs ruled the land, there were also fantastic saurian in the seas. Among the largest was Liopleurodon , a 23-foot-long marine reptile that swam the Jurassic seas more than 145 million years ago. While many members of the plesiosaur family had small heads and long necks, Liopleurodon belonged to a subgroup with big heads and short necks that allowed the carnivore to hunt large prey. “Armed with 4-inch teeth and capable of biting with incredible force,” Whitfield writes, “it would have been able to kill whatever it grabbed between its jaws.”

Today’s elephants have tusks that jut straight out from their jaws. But not all their ancient relatives had the same arrangement. Around 20 million years ago there lived a prehistoric pachyderm named Deinotherium with twin, curved tusks curving down from the jaw. Precisely what the elephant used these tusks for isn’t clear. One early—and fanciful idea—is that Deinotherium used them to anchor itself to riverbanks while sleeping. Paleontologists may yet discover the real answer.

Among all the carnivorous mammals that have ever lived, Andrewsarchus may have been the largest. The trouble is that this meat-eating beast is only known from a skull and a foot, Whitfield says, with no other fossils coming to light in nearly a century. Still, based on related animals, it seems that Andrewsarchus was about the size of a rhino and took down prey with massive jaws, acting more like an enormous wolf than a cat. Hopefully more fossils will fill in what we know of these 45-million-year-old enigmas.

Not all giant and impressive creatures are from the ancient past. Some lived relatively recently. Up until about 1,000 years ago, Whitfield notes, various species of elephant birds lived on Madagascar. On an island free from large carnivores, some of these flightless birds got to be over 10 feet tall and weighed more than 140 pounds. Their eggs were huge, larger than that of even the biggest non-avian dinosaurs. And their absence can still be felt. Elephant birds were herbivores and helped keep the ecosystem vibrant by spreading seeds through their droppings. Their disappearance changed the nature of the place they lived, just as every vanished species has.

This Artist Imagines How Nature Evolves Following an Environmental Apocalypse

Walk into a first-floor room at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the high-ceilinged space looks, at first, quite desolate. Tree stumps made of glass sprout from five rock-like mounds, and at the center of the room, nestled in a sixth craggy habitat, stands a tree made of copper and glass. Otherwise, the landscape seems barren and nearly sapped of color.

But grab one of the red-cased tablets off the wall or unlock a smartphone, and the exhibition springs to life with an augmented reality display. Aim the device’s camera at the tree rings, and inventive flora of the future appear, gently swaying in a virtual breeze. The exquisite world created in the museum's new exhibition “Reforestation of the Imagination,” comes straight from the mind of the Seattle-based artist Ginny Ruffner , who decided to ponder the imponderable—in the aftermath of an apocalyptic mass extinction event, how might life on Earth continue to evolve and thrive?

“Reforestation of the Imagination” presents an optimistic answer to that question. “I prefer to think that the world will evolve more beautifully,” says Ruffner, an artist whose work invokes themes of nature and resilience. “Who knows what wonderful things might happen?”

To see some of the “alternative evolution” possibilities the artist has crafted in her re-imagined world, visitors download the Reforestation app and focus the cell phone or tablet’s camera on one of the hand-painted glass tree trunks that dot the gallery. In the reimagined world, powder blue, scythe-like petals of the plant Ventus ingenero rotate in the wind blowing across the plant's grassland plains habitat. The new species is described in an informational box that appears with the touch of a button. A total of 18 imaginary plants, some with spiraling vines or blue flowers that resemble toilet plungers, grow in Ruffner’s new world.

Fittingly, the evolution-focused exhibition is part of the Renwick’s own progression. Robyn Kennedy , the museum’s chief administrator, views “Reforestation of the Imagination” as a sequel, in part, to the museum’s highly popular and much-acclaimed interactive and experiential shows—last year’s “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man” and the 2015 exhibition “Wonder.”

“We’re very conscious of moving into the 21st century,” says Kennedy, as the definition of craft art expands and includes new crossovers. For her part, Ruffner agrees that technology is expanding the possibilities for art: “I think that beauty itself is evolving,” she says.

Ruffner, who grew up in the South, is known for her glass art as well as her public art projects, including a nearly 30-foot-tall flowerpot installation in downtown Seattle. The artist graduated with a M.F.A. from the University of Georgia and relocated in 1984 to Seattle to teach at the Dale Chihuly-founded Pilchuck Glass School. Seven years after that move, when Ruffner was 39, an automobile accident nearly took her life. In a 2011 TEDx talk , Ruffner told of how doctors warned that she might never wake from a coma, let alone walk or speak again. But after five weeks, she did wake up, and after five years in a wheelchair, Ruffner relearned how to walk. Her drawing hand, her left, had been paralyzed, so she now paints with her right.

In 2014, Ruffner visited a tech company on a friend’s suggestion. Learning about augmented reality in the years before apps like Pokémon Go familiarized the public with the technology was, in Ruffner’s telling , proved a creative catalyst. It opened, she says, a Pandora’s Box of possibilities.

Augmented reality allows a digital environment to be overlaid onto the real world. By contrast, virtual reality shuts out the real world to immerse the user in a digitally created universe. In Pokémon Go , the physical locations double as must-visit landmarks in the game’s virtual world. An AR tour of George Washington's home, the popular Mount Vernon in Virginia, features virtual re-enactors and 3-D models. And the AR experience found in Google Glass, which, while short-lived on the general market, is now being used in manufacturing and may be able to help autistic children learn to recognize emotion.

But before she could create AR art, Ruffner had to school herself. “I didn’t know diddly-squat,” she laughs, adding, “I always love a good challenge.” The artist audited an augmented and virtual reality course at a local college, training herself to use the same software Pixar uses. She hired a classmate, digital designer Grant Kirkpatrick, as her tutor for the course, and the duo created AR projects, such as “ Poetic Hybrids ,” which allows the audience to collaborate on holographic sculptures.

It took the pair several years to take “Reforestation of the Imagination” from the germ of an idea to its final debut at Seattle’s MadArt Studio in early 2018. Activating AR from the glass tree stumps proved problematic. It would only be possible if they could make the surface flat, strip it of transparency and translucency, and add a high-contrast, unique pattern. Ruffner solved that conundrum, designing opaque white glass tree stumps that her glassblowing assistants crafted. Hand-painted tree rings cap off each stump. The ring pattern on the trees activates the app and in the viewfinder, the visitor finds the image of the corresponding AR plant.

Ruffner wanted exhibition viewers to experience a landscape when they walked in the door—not just an empty room peppered with AR-activating codes. To create the land masses that house the tree stumps, she partnered with a company that manufactures natural history displays for museums. They built six rocky islands to display the tree trunks and the bronze-and-fiberglass tree. Ruffner conceptualized the plants through watercolor paintings, and Kirkpatrick brought digital life, turning those paintings into 3-D holograms. (Ruffner’s paintings hang on the walls of the gallery.)

Finally, Ruffner, a gardening enthusiast, developed an imaginary taxonomy and backstory for each creation, looking up words in Latin to give them scientific names. Digitalis artherium counts among her favorites.​ The name is a wry art-world joke about a flower “formerly abundant in Manhattan,” whose dried, powdered petals possess hallucinogenic properties.

Ruffner doesn’t intend for the show to come off as preachy; rather, she’d like visitors to feel “hopeful and curious, two phrases I enjoy the most.” Yes, the exhibition initially shows a scene of environmental devastation that Ruffner describes as the result of climate change. The show doesn’t address the question of what happened to humans in the reimagined landscape, but through her digital flora, the artist says, “I just want to offer a not-so-bleak possibility.”

“ Reforestation of the Imagination ” will be on display at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum , located on Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street, from June 28, 2019 until January 5, 2020.