Without a doubt, Salvador Dalí would have been a selfie master. With his upturned mustache and expressive reactions, Dalí would have splashed our social media accounts with the best images. And thanks to the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, he sort of will be.
The museum teamed up with Goody, Silverstein & Partners to create a deepfake – in this case, a life-size recreation of the famed Spanish painter – for the Dalí Lives exhibit. “Using archival footage from interviews, GS&P pulled over 6,000 frames and used 1,000 hours of machine learning to train the AI algorithm on Dalí’s face,” The Verge reported. “His facial expressions were then imposed over an actor with Dalí’s body proportions, and quotes from his interviews and letters were synced with a voice actor who could mimic his unique accent, a mix of French, Spanish, and English.”
When you arrive to the museum, you can ring the bell on a kiosk. The artist then tells the visitor about himself, and because of the amount of footage, each person should get a different experience. He’ll then ask the person if they want to take a selfie, which will prompt him to turn around and allow the visitors to appear in the frame next to him.
Dalí Lives is a permanent exhibition and it is now on view.