— Puccini’s stage, breathing again. An interactive screen that reawakens Galileo Chini’s original set designs for Puccini’s Turandot through generative AI. Seen by 82,000 visitors in three cities.
In 2024, Bertelsmann curated a major Puccini exhibition at its Berlin headquarters — bringing back to life, among other things, the set designs for the opera Puccini left unfinished.
Working closely with the Ricordi Historical Archive in Milan — which is owned by Bertelsmann and holds hundreds of thousands of original documents spanning 200 years of Italian opera history — we built the interactive heart of the exhibition: an 8 × 3 meter screen on which visitors could watch Galileo Chini’s set design for Turandot transform before their eyes, from a sketch into a hyper-naturalistic rendering. Generative, but faithful to the original.
The pipeline ran in ComfyUI with Stable Diffusion, steered by ControlNets — so that the AI did not hallucinate freely but faithfully followed Galileo Chini’s compositions.
For the transitions between scenes, we made the intermediate steps of the diffusion model itself visible: the generation process became part of the staging.
The result: high-resolution AI images that visitors could change live on the wall.
The exhibition opened in Berlin and traveled to Milan and Gütersloh in 2024/25.
