The Endless Garden

Our design was driven by a fundamental question: How can participatory storytelling transform a museum visit into a moment of active discovery? To achieve this, we moved beyond traditional digital labels to create an experience rooted in spontaneous co-creation. We distilled Dalí's complex visual lexicon into 30 symbolic archetypes, inviting visitors to engage with these symbols through a series of lighthearted, dream-logic prompts. By establishing a personal connection with a Dream Object first, we lower the barrier to art history, allowing learning to happen naturally through curiosity and wonder.

The experience is structured as a phygital loop that bridges the digital installation and the museum's physical paintings.

A core challenge in generative museum installations is repetition fatigue. To preserve the aura of the individual experience within a shared space, we developed a proprietary real-time orchestration system. This algorithmic engine manages the population of the digital garden, ensuring that no two visitors in the gallery at the same time encounter identical objects. This technical constraint safeguards the user's sense of authorship and ensures that the Endless Garden remains truly infinite and non-repeating, mimicking the unpredictable nature of a dream.

The success of The Endless Garden is validated by significant shifts in visitor behavior, proving that experience-first design leads to higher retention.

• Deep Stickiness - Each visitor interacted with the co-creation tool an average of 1.8 times, indicating a high desire to explore multiple creative outcomes.

• Creative Ownership - A 54% share and download rate suggests that visitors felt a strong personal identity within their generated art, transforming a temporary museum visit into a lasting digital keepsake.

• Pedagogical Conversion - The 31% Learn More rate demonstrates that by leading with creativity, we successfully triggered a secondary desire for historical knowledge, proving that immersive design is a potent tool for modern museum education.

The experience was created for Alberto Giacometti & Salvador Dalí: Through & Beyond Surrealism, a collaborative exhibition between The Dalí Museum and Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti in Paris. Marking the first comparative presentation of these two artists in the United States, the exhibition brings together paintings, sculptures, and archival materials by Giacometti alongside works by Dalí from The Dalí Museum's collection, revealing unexpected parallels in their approaches to surrealism, the subconscious, and the human form.

Within this context, the project draws inspiration from a lesser-known episode in their shared history: an unrealized 1930s commission in which Dalí and Giacometti were invited to design an imaginative garden for the Count and Countess de Noailles. Though never realized, this speculative collaboration became the conceptual anchor for the digital experience. All symbolic references are derived from Dalí's surrealist language and correspond to works in The Dalí Museum's collection, allowing visitors to encounter the original artworks after participating in the experience and activating the museum space as a whole.

• Webby Award Nominee 2026 - Arts, Fashion and Culture
• 2026 SEGD Global Design Awards, Finalist
• FutureSpaces Behind the Scene Talk
• MuseumNext Digital Experience Summit 2026 Panel Talk
• The Endless Garden | The Dalí Museum
• The Dalí Museum Reveals a Groundbreaking Art-and-Garden Collaboration Between Alberto Giacometti and Salvador Dalí in a First-Of-Its-Kind U.S. Exhibition