In December, Google introduced that it will quickly launch a brand new model of its generative video mannequin, Veo 2. Among the many promised options have been a greater understanding of real-world physics, extra “nuances of human motion and expression,” and fewer unintentional “hallucinations” like further fingers.
The surreality now, nonetheless, is intentional.
On Wednesday, on the Google Cloud Subsequent convention in Las Vegas, the corporate demonstrated Veo 2 with a trailer for a brand new movie, produced by the Dali Museum and Goodby Silverstein & Companions, that brings to life Salvador Dali’s unmade screenplay Giraffes on Horseback Salad.
The screenplay was initially produced in 1937 in partnership with Harpo Marx with the thought of constructing it for the Marx Brothers at MGM Studios. Studio boss Louis B. Mayer didn’t just like the screenplay and killed the challenge.
The screenplay, per the press launch, follows “the story of a person who falls in love with a girl from a world the place desires are actuality. She attracts him into her universe, one that’s vibrant, chaotic, and boundless. However as their worlds start to merge, so does the battle—blurring the road between creativeness and destruction.”
This isn’t the primary time somebody has tried to make sense of the work. In 2019, author Josh Frank, illustrator Manuela Pertega and comic Tim Heidecker, developed a graphic novel based mostly on the screenplay, which Frank informed NPR was “loopy surreal and completely not digestible.” Based on Frank, it was seemingly unfinished, with manufacturing notes that learn merely “Insert Marx Brothers routine right here.”
It additionally isn’t the primary time that the Dali Museum has toyed with AI techologies. As ARTnews reported final 12 months, the museum labored with Goodby Silverstein & Companions to create a model of Dali’s Lobster Phone known as Ask Dali, the place museumgoers may “speak” to the artist through generative AI know-how.
On the time, Kathy Greif, the museum’s chief working officer and deputy director, informed ARTnews, “We consider Dali himself can be enjoying with these applied sciences in the event that they [had been] accessible in his lifetime. It’s an absolute service to his spirit to be utilizing this stuff. We’re right here to not solely protect however to delay his legacy.”
In the meantime, within the press launch for Giraffes, Jeff Goodby, co-chairman of Goodby Silverstein & Companions, described the brand new movie as not a “reproduction” of Dali’s work, however a “reawakening.” Including, “It’s some of the creatively thrilling issues we’ve ever completed.”
For these hoping to see a resurrection of the Marx Brothers’ trademark humor within the movie, as Dali seemingly supposed, it’s not current within the one-minute of launched footage. As ordinary with present generative AI know-how, the “movie” quantities largely to sluggish pans over hypersaturated footage, although on this case it comes with a voiceover from “Salvador Dali.”
