Replacing Dali with DALL:E – Recreating a 1960's 'Happening' to understand the impact of Industrialised Creativity on Performance. CAMBRIDGE CAMBRIDGE GENERATIVE AI IN EDUCATION GENERATIVE AI IN EDUCATION CONFERENCE 2024

Marshall McLuhan suggests that the great success of foundational technologies often leads to unintended negative "flip out" consequences—outcomes that are nearly impossible to predict. Similarly, Virginia Heffernan observes that new media technologies inevitably involve both "magic and loss," though fully understanding the nature of that loss is challenging. In today's era of industrialised creativity, technology increasingly seeks to replace human ingenuity. Could we, as creators, become "the loss"? To explore this question, the Media Arts Department at RHUL re-created a famous 1960s 'Happening,' where Salvador Dalí, Manitas de Plata, and José Reyes celebrated Catalan culture at the United Nations. While Manitas played flamenco guitar and José Reyes sang cante, Dalí painted. In our reimagining, a student jazz band and performance poets performed live before an audience. However, in place of Dalí, we connected to DALL-E’s API, asking it to "paint" what it heard. This experiment serves as a reality test for the tension between human creativity and AI, probing whether the "loss" lies in the replacement of human expression.