Dream of a conversation with Vincent van Gogh? AI tries to breathe new life into the artist.
Vincent van Gogh has been surprisingly busy for a dead man.
His paintings can be seen in major keys museum exhibitions this year. Immersive theaters in cities like Miami and Milan flourish with projections of his dazzling landscapes. His designs now appear on everything from sneakers to doormats, and a recent collaboration with the Pokémon gaming franchise was so popular that buyers left a mark at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, forcing the company to suspend sales of the trading cards in its gift shop .
But one of the boldest attempts to defend Van Gogh’s legacy yet takes place in the Musee D’Orsay in Paris, where a lifelike doppelgänger of the Dutch artist talks to visitors and offers insights into his own life and death (full of machine learning flubs).
“Bonjour Vincent,” intended to represent the painter’s humanity, it was put together by engineers who used artificial intelligence to analyze some 900 letters the artist wrote in the 19th century, as well as early biographies written about him. However, the algorithm still needed human guidance to answer the most sensitive questions from visitors, who talk through a microphone to Van Gogh’s replica on a digital screen. The most popular: Why did Van Gogh commit suicide? (The painter died in July 1890 after shooting himself in a wheat field near Auvers.)
Hundreds of visitors have asked that morbid question, museum officials said, explaining that the algorithm continually refines its answers depending on how the question is worded. AI developers have learned to gently steer the conversation about sensitive topics like suicide toward messages of resilience.
“I would like to beg this: hold on to life, because even in the darkest moments there is always beauty and hope,” the AI van Gogh said during an interview.
The program has some less oblique responses. “Ah, my dear visitor, the subject 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 plagued my mind,” Van Gogh said at another point, adding: “I saw no other way to find peace.”
Agnès Abastado, the museum’s head of digital development, said the discussion about developing a Van Gogh algorithm lasted almost a year. “One of the questions we asked ourselves was at what point was this Van Gogh the real Van Gogh,” she said. “It was important to show how this technology will not only be a commercial project, but also a cultural project that can improve the representation of knowledge.”
The initiative is an integral part of a larger effort by the Musée D’Orsay, a public institution backed by the French government, to highlight its relevance in modern life, while most of its collection dates from the 19th century. And to make that leap forward, the museum is partnering with several companies that could benefit from the venture. Some programs are related to the current exhibition: “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: the last months”, through February 4, which looks at the crucial and exhausting last months of the artist’s life, when – under the care of Dr. Gachet, the homeopathic and allopathic physician – created more than 74 paintings and 33 drawings before committing suicide.
A disturbing finale – but apparently not too disturbing to bring into people’s homes. Jumbo Mana, the tech startup that developed the Van Gogh algorithm, said it plans to release the Van Gogh AI program on Amazon Alexa and Echo devices within a year. The company is working on a similar project based on the life of French poet Arthur Rimbaud, another radical artist who experimented with hallucinations and the edges of consciousness.
“We are able to bring these characters to life, but we are not trying to resurrect them,” said Christophe Renaudineau, CEO of Jumbo Mana. “We are currently working with historians to ensure that our Van Gogh can be more accurate.”
The exhibition also includes a separate virtual reality experience, “Van Gogh’s Palette.” It is a shared production between the museum, Vive Arts, Lucid Realities and Tournez S’il Vous Plait. The Musée D’Orsay will receive a portion of the proceeds and the team is working on a longer 20-minute version to be distributed and exhibited worldwide.
Many art historians were dismayed to see Van Gogh become a digital ambassador for museum efforts that seemed to commodify his paintings. But some scholars admitted that they could understand the call.
“He was a very intense lover of popular culture in his own time,” says Michael Lobel, the author of one upcoming book about the artist’s involvement in industrialization. “Van Gogh thought very carefully and carefully about his own potential to create images for a broader audience.”
The experiments with Van Gogh’s paintings have thus continued, including their implementation in the video game world of Roblox, an online game popular with millions of children. His 1887 “Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat” is one of nearly forty works of art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that can be scanned into digital clothing for avatars in Roblox.
“Wearables are such an important part of Roblox,” said Claire Lanier, a senior manager of social media at the Met, who led the project with help from a corporate sponsor, Verizon. “We wanted the artwork to feel tangible to children and their experiences.”
By scanning a Van Gogh portrait through a mobile app, Replica, users gain access to digital versions of the artist’s hat and jacket, which can be combined with elements from other museum objects, such as medieval armor and an Egyptian headdress.
(For those looking for real threads, the museum recently announced a collaboration with the fashion brand Todd Snyder, which sold Van Gogh’s paintings in his parkas and sweaters for hundreds of dollars.)
“For years, museums wouldn’t even put their images online,” Lanier noted. “But the pandemic has really changed people’s relationship with museums in the digital world. It has given us opportunities.”
But these opportunities leave some museums in uncharted territory. While the Van Gogh Museum has had a history of licensing the artist’s paintings for skateboards, scarves and trinkets, its recent partnership with Pokémon Company International went haywire when scalpers flooded their gift shop and scooped up the special trading cards to commemoration of the museum’s 50th anniversary. sold online for hundreds of dollars. The image of Pikachu drawn in the painter’s 1887 style “Self-portrait with gray felt hat” was later withdrawn from sale due to the frenzy.
Now those maps make research difficult for some Van Gogh historians. “When I look up van Gogh on eBay, it’s all Pokémon cards,” he grumbled Wouter van der Veen, a specialist on the artist who regularly uses the auction website to find 19th-century papers related to the painter.
Over the past year, the scientist has participated in several Van Gogh projects, including the AI experiment at Musée D’Orsay, where he provided feedback to engineers to hone its accuracy. Van der Veen’s influence can even be heard in the way the artist speaks French: he introduced apparent grammatical ‘errors’ because it was Van Gogh’s second language.
“You have the same sentence length and lack of punctuation, where words are mixed up,” says Van der Veen. The errors have alarmed some French visitors, who have had to be assured by staff that these errors are intentional.
But the historian pointed out that other errors in “Bonjour Vincent” reveal a generative portrait of the Dutch artist that is far from complete. Sometimes he gives two different answers to the same question, mixing historical facts with irrelevant information.
A definite mistake was when the doppelgänger called “Starry Night” as Van Gogh’s favorite work of art, saying it was “a manifestation of my excited self and my longing for the divine.”
The real Van Gogh, according to his own letters, was much more ambivalent about the 1889 painting. He originally referred to “Starry Night” as a study and said the artist Émile Bernard that it was a “setback”, adding: “I’m once again allowing myself to make oversized stars.”
Although somewhat embarrassed, the team working on “Bonjour Vincent” said they were confident that major inaccuracies would be ironed out before the program’s wider release, hoping this would expand the collection’s reach.
“If 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 attractive to everyone.”