PARIS — For someone who is dead, Vincent van Gogh has been incredibly busy.
Immersive theaters in cities like Miami and Milan flourish with projections of their swirling landscapes.
His designs now appear on everything from sneakers to doormats, and a recent collaboration with the Pokémon game franchise was so popular that buyers stampeded into Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum, forcing the suspension of trading card sales in the gift shop.
However, one of the boldest attempts to celebrate Van Gogh's legacy is at the Orsay Museum in Paris, where an identical double of the Dutch artist chats with visitors.
“Bonjour Vincent”, which seeks to represent the painter's humanity, was assembled by engineers who used artificial intelligence to analyze some 900 letters written by the artist, as well as biographies.
However, the algorithm still needed some guidance on how to answer questions from visitors, who converse with the replica on a digital screen via a microphone. The most popular: Why did Van Gogh commit suicide?
Museum officials said the algorithm is constantly refining its answers, depending on how the question is asked. AI developers have learned to steer that conversation toward messages of resilience.
“I would implore this: hold on to life, for even in the darkest moments, there is always beauty and hope,” Van Gogh's AI said during an interview.
The program has some more direct answers. “Ah, my dear visitor, the issue of my suicide is a heavy burden to bear. In my darkest moments, I believed that ending my life was the only escape from the torment that afflicted my mind,” Van Gogh answered at another time.
“One of the questions we asked ourselves was at what point was this Van Gogh the real Van Gogh,” said Agnès Abastado, head of digital development at the museum. “It was important to show how this technology will not only be a commercial project, but a cultural project that can enhance the exhibition of knowledge.”
The initiative is an integral part of a broader effort by the Musée d'Orsay, a public institution supported by the French government, to reaffirm its relevance in modern life when most of its collection originates in the 19th century.
The museum has partnered with several companies that could benefit from the project. Some programs are related to his current exhibition, “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: The Last Months,” through February 4, which looks at the artist's final months before his suicide in 1890.
Jumbo Mana, the tech startup that developed Van Gogh's algorithm, announced that it plans to launch Van Gogh's AI program on Amazon's Alexa and Echo devices next year. The company is working on a similar project based on the life of French poet Arthur Rimbaud.
Many art historians were dismayed to see Van Gogh become a digital ambassador for the efforts of museums that seemed to treat his paintings as commodities. But some scholars understand the appeal.
“He was a very intense devotee of popular culture in his time,” noted Michael Lobel, author of an upcoming book about the artist. “Van Gogh thought very carefully about his own potential to create images for a wider audience.”
Therefore, experiments with Van Gogh paintings have continued, with varying results.
Wouter van der Veen, a Van Gogh specialist, offered feedback to the AI program's engineers to improve its accuracy by suggesting grammatical “misses” because French was Van Gogh's second language.
However, the historian points out that a faithful portrait of the artist is far from complete.
One notable mistake was when the stuntman named “The Starry Night” as Van Gogh’s favorite work of art, stating that it was “a manifestation of my agitated self and my longing for the divine.” The real Van Gogh was more ambivalent about the 1889 painting, according to his own letters, calling it “a setback.”
The team that worked on “Bonjour Vincent” said they were confident that any major inaccuracies would be resolved before the general release.
“When it's Van Gogh, people like it,” Abastado said. “But money is not our goal as a public museum. Our goal is to make the collection speak to everyone.”
By: Zachary Small
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/7044719, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-12-26 22:15:05
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