Right now, everyone is talking about ChatGPT and the possibilities behind chatbots powered by AI. This is a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows anyone to have human-like conversations. The truth is that this technology has endless ways to be implemented and deliver great experiences to users.

In tourism, it can leverage concierge-like services to recommend travel destinations or create personalised itineraries. Content production, as something critical in the upper funnel phases, is also something that is pushed with this type of technology.

Recently, Faroe Islands’ National Gallery launched an AI exhibit where visitors had the opportunity to create their own images of the Faroe Islands - and see how the Faroe Islands would've looked if they were painted by famous artists. To do so, they used Midjourney, an AI program.

In this case study, however, we will explore how AI has been revolutionising the museum experience, by providing visitors with interactive and unique experiences.

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Artificial Intelligence in a Museum

The Dali Museum, in Florida, offers visitors a creative way to get to know Dali’s art from iconic melting clocks to imaginative visual illusions and avant-garde symbols. 

The Shape of Dreams was the latest exhibition to be launched with works by Frida Kahlo, Paul Delvaux, Pat Steir, Philip Guston, Max Beckmann, Lodovico Carracci and Odilon Redon. It explores centuries of dream-inspired paintings from the 16th to the 20th century and inspires questions about the nature of reality, whilst encouraging viewers to examine dreams through different lenses.

As a part of this exhibition, the Museum added The Dalí's Dream Tapestry experience. In short, it uses AI (never before used in a museum) to turn a dream into a work of art, giving people direct access to their dreams. As a result, visitors create fine art pieces from their own dreams. With this, we all see how Dalí can enhance all types of people's creativity.

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The Dream Tapestry experience is powered by DALL·E, an AI model that takes the text and turns it into images - that never existed before. This incredible and mind-blowing experience was developed in collaboration with Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Minds Over Matter and OpenAI.

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After transforming personal dreams into individual art pieces, the AI model then connects those with other visitors’ images to produce a composite artwork, displayed on a 12-foot screen. Later on the website, one can take a look at the resulting collages and share them on social.

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Why is this relevant to visitors?

This interactive experience is all about empowering museum visitors to create art pieces based on their own. Empowerment is key to offering them fulfilment. There’s no point in delivering passive experiences to people when technology allows them to be part of the process. 

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This type of experience that brings dreams to life is inspiring and unique and for that reason, it is worth highlighting. Particularly in museums, people now expect to be surprised as they are no longer a repository of artwork but a nest of immersive experiences. 

Technology plays a key role by enabling these experiences. In this case, it is amazing to see how The Dali Museum was able to use it to leverage this exhibition around dreams into a place where anyone can easily create individual artwork, ready to be shared with everyone.

What is also remarkable about this experience is that it joins the dreams of 6 different people together on one big screen, proving a collaborative picture. This is great to understand what a community, a place or a region is dreaming about at a particular moment in time and infer sociological implications from it, with the help of Dalí.

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