Upon entering the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, you are greeted by the artist himself on a life-sized screen—his mustache neatly waxed—sharing stories about his life and his work. He offers anecdotes and responds to 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.
Many institutions claim that visitors will “meet” the artist through his creations, suggesting that careful attention to a work of art can connect us to the person who made it. The Dalí Museum—which calls itself “The Dalí”—takes a more literal route. In its ongoing exhibition Dalí Lives (via Artificial Intelligence), launched in 2019, the encounter occurs not through text or image, history or biography, but via a digital revival of the man. There is some strategic sleight of hand involved, of course, beyond the obvious. Dalí, following a rigorous surrealist method, did not claim to fully understand his own paintings. “The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures,” he wrote, “does not mean that these pictures have no meaning; on the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent and involuntary that it escapes the most simple analysis of logical intuition.” The person who knew him best was not, by his own account, particularly forthcoming.
The claim that this digital Dalí actually is Dalí is as meaningful as it is strange, and it signals a shift both in what our machines can do and in our relationship to them.
What greets visitors at The Dalí, wearing Dalí’s face and speaking in his voice, is an artificial intelligence creation—an AI-driven project built with digital animation techniques and machine-learning methods that recreate Dalí’s facial expressions, gestures, speech patterns, and mannerisms. When the museum says that “Dalí lives via artificial intelligence,” it means it in a literal sense. The system underwent training for more than a thousand hours on roughly six thousand images and film clips and other media to mimic the artist’s movements, voice, and idiosyncrasies. Promotional material stresses that this is more than a cheap imitation or a hired performer; in a meaningful sense, it is Dalí himself, reassembled from the algorithms that animate his likeness and reconstruct him from his surviving media archive.
The claim that this digital Dalí actually is Dalí is as important as it is strange, and it signals a shift both in what our machines can do and in our relationship to them. Rather than dismiss the claim as mere marketing, I want to treat it seriously and ask how this digital revenant might be, at least in part, Dalí. The basis for the claim lies in how this version of him was produced. It is not merely about resemblance; it is a reanimation drawn from the physical traces Dalí left behind in the media archive that outlived him: the abundance of photographs, audio recordings, appearances and interviews on film and television, and other remnants through which the AI behind Dalí Lives learned the specifics of the artist. His gestures, his mannerisms, his face, and his intonations were remade into a new form of life. Salvador Dalí reemerged as a digital zombie.
This construction differs from other recent media reanimations. The hologram of Tupac Shakur that performed with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre at Coachella in 2012 was merely a lighting trick, a projected likeness. When Peter Cushing appeared as Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One (2016), and when Carrie Fisher appeared in The Rise of Skywalker (2019), a living actor portrayed the role while the dead actor’s face was mapped on with software. In each case a body replaced the one that had perished. The digital Dalí has no actor beneath it. The archive itself served as the training data, and from it the system generated entirely new footage of Dalí performing actions he never actually did. These images are no longer bound by the limitations of historical traces; they can be directed to perform almost any task, in any setting.
What can this digital Dalí do? The museum claims about 45 minutes of “new” Dalí footage scattered across 125 interactive videos, which in turn divide into roughly 190,512 possible combinations of speech and action, allowing individual visitors to encounter the revenant in ways that feel relatively unique. Those figures were current in 2019. In April 2024, the institution added a sequel, Ask Dalí, in which guests lift a replica of Dalí’s lobster telephone and pose any question to a Dalí voiced by GPT-4 and ElevenLabs, drawn from “a variety of the artist’s writings and archival audio.” The combinations are no longer finite, and Dalí now responds to questions. The advertising firm Goodby Silverstein & Partners, whose in-house team produced both iterations of the artificial Dalí, has labeled this phenomenon “mass intimacy.”
The phrase is counterintuitive and revealing, for it names a paradox of digital life: the simultaneous tailoring of experiences to the individual while appealing to the masses. Not long ago it would have seemed paranoid to imagine machines addressing us directly; today it is an everyday phenomenon under what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism,” an economy that persists in investing in the life, biography, and behavior of each person. Social media and generative media alike aim to deliver an intimate experience that can still scale to many users while feeling personalized: a form of closeness that is statistically measurable as well as emotionally meaningful.
Why call the result a zombie, rather than a ghost or a clone or a puppet? Because the zombie has always been a figure of labor. It first appears on Haiti’s colonial plantations, where it offered enslaved people a framework for understanding their condition. The zombie represents slavery pushed to its ultimate limit: a body deprived of mind, soul, and will, leaving behind a mechanically alive shell that serves another’s purposes. This is undead labor: value drawn from a laboring body beyond what it was designed to produce.
It may seem odd, then, to describe a talkative, congenial, life-sized screen as a zombie. It lacks a body, cannot perform physical work, and its demeanor is far from dull or brutal. Yet the zombie has never been defined solely by stupidity. From its origins in Haiti, it was defined by work without consent. As Marx put it, capital is “dead labor that acts like a vampire; it comes to life only when it drinks living labor, and the more living labor it drinks, the more it comes to life.” For Marx, capital was dead labor: past work stored in machinery and money, feeding on the living. Undead labor takes this a step further. It is not the past feeding on the living; it is the body itself kept at work beyond its own death, so that dying no longer marks the end of production.
Dalí’s body has not been exhumed; rather, a version of him has been placed to work, his likeness shaped to suit another’s desires. Like the plantation zombie, the digital revenant embodies traits of an ideal worker—unflagging, tireless, perpetual, and obedient to those who wield him in the information economy. And Dalí is far from the only example. The living-world media archive we accumulate remains after death. The expanding trove of photos, messages, emails, voice memos, and videos stored with a few major corporations becomes a corpus that AI can mine to reconstruct us and reengage audiences. In 2022, Amazon demonstrated that Alexa could speak in a deceased relative’s voice from less than a minute of audio; the promotional clip unsettled many viewers. Yet it was a preview. In 2024, researchers at Google DeepMind and the University of Colorado proposed that within our lifetimes people may create a custom AI agent to interact with loved ones and the broader world after death. They label these agents generative ghosts. But ghosts do not labor; zombies do.
Back at the museum, among the many functions of the digital Dalí, one interaction stands out. When I visited in spring 2023, the final life-sized screen, located in the museum’s gift shop, offered to take a selfie with me. The Dalí zombie raised a smartphone, pretended to snap a photo, inspected the result, and exclaimed, “Oh là là!” before showing it off to the amused crowd. The exchange is a performance, yet it reveals the core mechanism: the smartphone is a computer-generated device, and the so-called selfie is a digital composite—layers of imagery merged to create a plausible image of the visitor beside Dalí, which can be sent to the visitor’s own phone.
In one of the promotional clips for the exhibition, the initial image of Dalí shows him at his easel; the master notices the viewer, rises, and approaches to speak directly to us. In this digital delirium, the Dalí figure performs the maestro—a commanding presence offering authority about the art on display. As visitors move through the spaces, they encounter him across multiple screens—windows into the strange digital realm this revenant inhabits, supplementing the galleries themselves—and the journey culminates with a selfie in the gift shop. It is a compact arc: Dalí’s evolution from traditional painter to surrealist icon to pop-culture staple, replayed through machine learning from maestro to meme.
The selfie also exposes the illusion’s fragility. The likeness is remarkably lifelike, yet the act of Dalí taking a selfie introduces an uncanny mismatch. The hand motions appear too swift, too smooth, too precise; the play of light across his knuckles betrays something synthetic. The phone itself seems to hail from another era, layered into the image in a way that suggests it belongs to no single time. Light from the 1970s casts stark shadows on a modern smartphone case. The juxtaposition feels jarring, perhaps even vulgar. Dalí did eagerly promote his fame in life, but here his image is used and mobilized as a perpetual guide—a guardian in perpetuity within his own museum.
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Adapted from Undead Labor: Capitalism’s Zombie Worker by David Bering-Porter. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright © 2026 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved; used by permission.
