When you walk into the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, Dalí himself will greet you. He appears on a life-sized screen, mustache waxed, and talks about his life and his work. He tells anecdotes. He answers questions in his own voice. The museum promises visitors an “opportunity to learn more about Salvador Dalí’s life from the person who knew him best: the artist himself.” Yet, Dalí died in 1989.

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Many museums and galleries claim that visitors will “meet” the artist through the work, the idea being that close attention to a work of art leads, inevitably, to an encounter with the person who made it. The Dalí Museum (or “The Dalí,” as it calls itself) has something more literal in mind. In its ongoing exhibition Dalí Lives (via Artificial Intelligence) , which opened in 2019, the meeting takes place not through text or image, history or biography, but through a digital reanimation of the man.…