The Dalí Museum’s AI Experience Allows Visitors to Transform their Dreams into Art

A new exhibition at The Dalí Museum examines the profound yet universal human occurrence, the dream, through renowned artists’ works and a new interactive Artificial Intelligence (AI) experience. The Shape of Dreams, on view Nov. 25th, 2022-April 30th, 2023, explores 500 years of paintings from the 16th to 20th centuries and examines dreams through different lenses — psychological, religious and metaphysical. An innovative AI area offers visitors the opportunity to see their own dreams transformed into works of art.

The Dalí’s debut of its latest innovation, the Dream Tapestry, continues the Museum’s commitment to engaging visitors through immersive, interactive experiences while providing an educational art encounter. The experience was developed by The Dalí in collaboration with Goodby Silverstein & Partners (GS&P), with creative concepting by Minds Over Matter, and OpenAI — the creator of the text-to-image AI system DALL·E.

The Dream Tapestry begins by asking visitors to describe a recent, recurring or favourite dream. Using each visitor’s input, personal dreams are revealed as individualised art pieces based on the artistic styles featured in The Shape of Dreams exhibition. OpenAI’s DALL·E creates original, photo-realistic images from written descriptions. The inspiring dream activity marks the first interactive experience of DALL·E in a museum.

In yet another first for DALL·E, every few minutes the Museum’s on-site experience seamlessly connects each of these personal dreams into a one-of-a-kind collective dream tapestry, displayed on a 12-foot screen on The Dalí’s gallery walls.

“Salvador Dalí relied heavily on dreams in the making of his art and encouraged us all to study our night time journeys,” said Jeff Goodby, co-founder and co-chairman of GS&P. “The Dream Tapestry will visualiSe a remembered or imagined dream in an artistic style, magically joining together the dreams of six different visitors. Amazingly, this will give us a collective image of what we are dreaming as a country — even as a world — at that particular moment.”

A presentation of how the experience was created, how the technology works and a gallery of each dream created in real-time at The Dalí are available at TheDali.org/Dreaming.

“We are accustomed to the way our waking life enters our dreams, leaking images and voices from the day’s encounter into a sea of dream images borne of our past or even from beyond our own lives,” said Hank Hine, executive director of The Dalí and curator of The Shape of Dreams exhibition. “With the Dream Tapestry, visitors to The Dalí can bring to their waking experience the images painted from our dreams. We believe that this will amplify Museum visitors’ experience with emotions and memories.”

Seeking to further understand how artistic expressions shape our imaginations — and have done so for centuries — The Shape of Dreams exhibition includes art by Frida Kahlo, Paul Delvaux, Pat Steir, Philip Guston, Max Beckmann, Lodovico Carracci, Luca Giordano and Odilon Redon. Together, the works address manners of representation and consider how the waking world influences the dream. Several works from The Dalí’s permanent collection are placed in dialog with these works to examine how Western artists have conveyed dreams, exploring the continuity and disconnections between the past and present.

The exhibition features a selection of art on loan from American institutions, including the National Gallery of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, The New Orleans Museum of Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Chicago Art Institute and Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Shape of Dreams is accompanied by a full-colour catalogue, The Shape of Dreams: Five Centuries of Painted Dreams from the Divine, Mythology & the Mind, which shares an expanded selection of dream-inspired works by celebrated artists as well as an essay by Hine.

The presenting sponsor of The Shape of Dreams is Therapedic | Tommy Bahama Mattresses with support from Antinori & Weinman Families, Aveda Florida, BNO Creative Labs, and Sandy Taraszki & David Zuern, airport partner St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport (PIE) and the hotel partner TradeWinds Island Resorts.