Author Topic: Visiting The Dali Museum  (Read 2964 times)

Dragon

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Visiting The Dali Museum
« on: May 27, 2022, 22:53:33 »
Yesterday evening, I took 2 of my kids to The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. Overall, I definitely enjoyed the museum and recommend it to anyone who is interested in Surrealist art. I had visited the Salvador Dali Museum with my family years ago, actually before it was moved to the current building. I enjoyed the museum very much and remember that there was a guided tour before, which I enjoyed at the time. We had to buy our tickets for a particular time slot, so I thought it was for a guided tour, but we were told when we checked in that the Augmented Reality mode of the mobile app had replaced the guided tours.

I was disappointed that the human guided tour was replaced by the mobile app although my kids thought it was neat. Initially I just didn't feel like installing another app for one-time use, but got a little more frustrated with the performance of the app. Although the app worked on my daughter's Apple phone, it didn't work very well on my phone (Samsung Android). There was an Augmented Reality mode that would interact with some of the painting. AR would not load for any paintings that I tried it on. The phones are encouraged to use everywhere, even allowing photos of the paintings to be taken as long as they are not for commercial use and also not using flash photography. I tried using the Camera feature in The Dali App to take photos, but none of them appeared in the my phone's Photo Gallery, so that was a disappointment. Photos taken with the Take Selfie mode, which adds a Dali-style mustache to the target of the Selfie,  appeared in my Photo Gallery, but not the regular Take Photos mode. There was a camera shutter sound and the picture would appear for a moment, but all those were lost. Fortunately I realized with enough time to take some photos with my children using my regular camera before leaving the museum. Lastly, I was happy to see videos of Dali that were setup to interact with the museum guests on tall screens in a few different places to give a more personal view of him, and there was even one near the entrance where Dali would offer to take a selfie with the guests, but the angle was off and there wasn't much of a warning to get into the photo. Maybe if they had the angle adjusted down and have marks on the ground to stand it would be better.

The real point of what I was there to see, however, was quite impressive to me. I liked the layout of the gallery, with the chronological order of the sections so that we could see his progression of style throughout life. It's always amazing to me to see how different the size is of the things in person rather than just seeing photos of the paintings made for print (in books or wall hangings) that don't show anything for reference to the actual size. I took some photos with my daughters next to the paintings as a reminder that we were there but also as a size comparison. I would definitely go there again. My youngest daughter said she enjoyed it, but my oldest daughter admitted as we left that she was bored. Anyway, both were happy to go get some food afterward.
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Dragon

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Re: Visiting The Dali Museum
« Reply #1 on: May 29, 2022, 18:41:30 »
My girls with three Salvador Dali paintings.
"Hello IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again? ... OK, well, the button on the side. Is it glowing?... Yeah, you need to turn it on. Err, the button turns it on. Yeah, you do know how a button works, don't you? No, not on clothes." - Roy (The IT Crowd)