Crossroads Roundup: A.I. Dalí, Discovery of Polynesian Cities from 300 A.D., and Winston Churchill's Most Hated Portrait

Our favorite stories on art, archaeology, folklore, and more from this past week.

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Happy Roundup! If you missed it, I had the opportunity to write a guest essay for PRETEND IT EXISTS all about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and The Little Prince. Be sure to check it out here, and stay tuned for Melody Hansen’s work to appear soon in The Crossroads Gazette!

Portrait of Salvador Dalí, Allan Warren ca. 1972. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Another artist is turned into an AI robot. This time, it’s Salvador Dalí. 

The irony of this is not lost on me—after all, Dalí was a Surrealist. 

The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida has installed a replica of the artist’s Lobster Telephone (1938), in which visitors can “answer the phone” and have a conversation with an artificial intelligence program trained on Dalí’s writing and archival audio of his voice. 

The exhibit was created in partnership with the San Francisco-based advertising firm Goodby Silverstein & Partners. In a statement from the museum, Jeff Goodby (co-founder and co-chairman of GS&P) remarked, “Dalí was fascinated by the latest tools and technologies of his era and continually explored various artistic media. ‘Ask Dalí’ provides a delightful new way to interact with machine-learning technology. Dalí’s poetic writings, in an imaginative style all his own, are the basis of the training, which provides dynamic and unpredictable answers to visitors’ questions.”