Dalí's scientific obsessions take shape in the metaverse

He painted a Coca-Cola before Warhol, he was a pioneer in turning his life into a work of art and in collaborating with computer scientists, he fought a painting duel with a computer decades before digital art appeared and he affirmed that “painting it will be cybernetic or it will not be”.

Visionary and clairvoyant, Salvador Dalí was attracted to science and technology throughout his life and the

, a drawing

series , which he exhibited in 1957 at the Carstairs gallery in New York, constitutes a clear antecedent of virtual reality.

All the scientific obsessions of Dalí, multifaceted artist where they exist, are reflected in

, the new bet, the most ambitious since its opening three years ago, of the Ideal Digital Arts Center in Barcelona, ​​which with its atypical programming managed to stay active and full (although at 50% capacity) even on the darkest days of the pandemic.

More information

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With

, the Ideal scores several goals.

He has managed to get the Dalí Foundation, always very reluctant to allow the use of the Empordà painter's work, to allow the intervention of more than 150 works, with the only condition that they appear in their entirety at some point.

"Getting permission to deconstruct, transform and animate the pieces of an artist as protected as Dalí has ​​been a real achievement," says the director of the center, Jordi Sellas, who has had the close collaboration and supervision of the Center for Dalinian Studies and of the director of the Dalí museums, Montse Aguer.

From a technological point of view, 1.2 million euros and the collaboration of the most cutting-edge studios in the various fields of new technologies have been necessary to convert Dalí's dreamlike universe into an immersive and interactive space,

Before giving in to the technological experience, you can enjoy some gems: a film shot in New York in 1965 in which Dalí talks about cybernetics, another with interviews conducted in Paris a few years later and collected in the book

and the video in which he competes with a computer painting actress Rachel Welch.

'The persistence of memory' in the exhibition 'Cybernetic Dalí' at the Ideal Digital Arts Center in Barcelona. Ideal Digital Arts Center

Dalí talks about the challenges of optics, nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, catastrophe theory, sacred geometry, the fourth dimension and DNA as proof of our immortality.

"Before the tables of Moses, the law was already contained in the codes of the genetic spirals", said the artist who, in his peculiar English, did not hesitate to affirm: "I am the true inventor of cybernetics".

That immersive experience that Dalí was already looking for in the theater-museum, inaugurated in Figueres in 1974, is reflected in the immersive room, where for half an hour the viewer is completely submerged in a tsunami of pixels.

The piece includes three minutes generated by artificial intelligence.

"They are images created by the machine, something that Dalí advocated more than 40 years ago," explains Sellas.

You can also see the hologram of the musician Alice Cooper with the acid colors of the 70s and, decorated with the typical elements of the Dalinian universe, an XXL reproduction of the

from 1974, inspired by the mummy of the Chinese princess, guarded by the famous terracotta army, although Dalí dressed her in a suit of electrical circuits, instead of jade plates.

The 'Cybernetic Dalí' exhibition at the Ideal Digital Arts Center in Barcelona. Ideal Digital Arts Center

The high point comes with the metaverse, where, thanks to state-of-the-art virtual reality goggles, the visitor becomes a diver wearing a

diving suit and boarding a ghostly ship, whose figurehead is

.

For 12 minutes the audience is surrounded by a whirlwind of Dalinian elements: elephants with endless legs, starving ants, crumbling and rebuilding walls, swarms of fireflies, a giant walkable egg, planets that transform into jellyfish and a moon that it turns into an egg and then into a sun.

The experience is so intense that more than one visitor ends up overwhelmed (some even dizzy) due to the lack of spatial references and the novelty of the sensation.

“It is the first time in the world that a metaverse has been created that can be accessed by 40 people at the same time to individually and collectively enjoy a constantly evolving digital space,” says Sellas.

If the previous proposals of the Ideal, dedicated to Gustav Klimt and Frida Kahlo, were successful, this one promises to break records.

On the opening day, more than 15,000 people had already purchased their tickets and twenty cities had queued to receive the show over the next four years, starting with London, Istanbul and Buenos Aires, followed by Zurich, Munich, Torino , Rome, Cologne, Paris, Bristol, Dublin, Valencia and Bilbao, among others.

Simultaneously, the Dalí Foundation has granted another license to the company ArtDidaktik to develop an exhibition project of a didactic nature that recounts the painter's personal and professional career through 160 works in digital format.

, which will be installed from October 8 to March 7 at the Ifema fairgrounds in Madrid, proposes a sensory and multimedia journey through the artist's work with virtual and augmented reality techniques, light boxes and many screens.

In this case, the Dalí Foundation has been responsible for selecting the 160 works that make up the exhibition, whose originals are distributed in more than 20 museums and private collections around the world.

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