surrealism
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Salvador Dali's AI clone will welcome visitors to his museum
If you're planning a trip to the Dali Museum this spring, you might meet an unexpected guest: namely, Salvador Dali himself. The St. Petersburg, Florida venue has announced that an AI recreation of the artist will grace screens across the museum starting in April. A team from Goodby Silverstein & Partners used footage of Dali to train a machine learning system on how to mimic the artist's face, and superimposed that on an actor with a similar physique. The virtual painter will both draw on Dali's own writings as well as comment on events that happened well after his 1989 death -- it should at once be educational and as surreal as Dali's work.
These surrealist games melt more than clocks
Some say surrealism was the most influential art movement of the past century and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it's had an effect on video game developers too. The games you'll find below weren't made by Salvador Dalí or M.C. Escher, but the influence those mind-bending artists had is unmistakable. And it's not just limited to endless staircases or clocks melting off the side of a ledge (although those make appearances) in indie games, either. Dream-like visuals and landscapes have dotted the world of blockbuster games too -- not even God of War 3 was immune when it released in 2010. Let's take a mind-bending trip together in the gallery below, shall we?
'Un Chien Andalou' inspires a surreal indie game from Russian devs
In 1929, famed artist Salvador Dalí and filmmaker Luis Buñuel awoke from a night of strange dreams, Buñuel recalling the image of a razor blade cloud slicing through the moon as if it were an eyeball, and Dalí describing a human hand covered in ants. They turned these images into a silent, surrealist short film called Un Chien Andalou, which opens on a woman with one eye held open, a cloud cutting across the moon and a blade slicing through the eye of a dead calf. The hand, crawling with ants, also makes an appearance. The film has no plot, but it's rife with emotive and disturbing imagery. Cut to 2014, when Russian game developers Ilya Kononenko and Yuliya Kozhemyako decided the first scene of Un Chien Andalou would make the perfect setting for their entry in a local game jam with the theme "Phobias." Their completed game is now due out on April 3rd, called The Tender Cut.
