ARTificial intelligence creates global publicity.

Tourists are increasingly choosing travel destinations based on images and recommendations from friends and acquaintances. In 2022, recommendations from friends and acquaintances were the primary driver (88%), followed by social media (62%).

But tourists tend to take pictures of the same destinations and motifs, and the pictures they take of the Faroe Islands can be confusingly similar to nearest competitors such as Iceland, Sweden, and Norway. So how could we create completely new images of the Faroe Islands?

We were given an almost impossible challenge with a sky-high goal:

• To create images of the Faroe Islands that stand out from competitors and the thousands of existing photos.
• The images should inspire others to create images of the Faroe Islands.
• The images can generate global press coverage of the Faroe Islands without media budget.

Selected results.

Due to the remote location of the Faroe Islands and low historical awareness, the greatest artists of history had never visited the Faroe Islands. But imagine if, for example, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, or Van Gogh had painted the Faroe Islands? And imagine if they could do it today?

Long before Midjourney became world-renowned, we got access to their beta version 1.0 as some of the first in the world. We used it to revive history’s greatest artists by getting artificial intelligence to paint the classic Faroese motifs. By combining real images of the Faroe Islands with prompts like “paint this by Claude Monet,” “Pablo Picasso,” or “Van Gogh,” we could create entirely new images inspired by the world’s greatest artists.

We challenged our followers and Midjourney’s community on Discord to create the most beautiful new paintings and got a robot to paint them. To create press coverage and local anchoring, we contacted the Faroe Islands Art Museum with all our paintings and, in collaboration with the museum, succeeded in arranging the world’s first exhibition of paintings created by artificial intelligence at a national gallery.

Results

Through Visit Faroe Islands’ social channels, the exhibition, and Midjourney, a broad audience gained access to try the latest technology. Even people who were not in the Faroe Islands could suddenly create “artworks” and share them on social media. Regardless of their artistic competence.

In this way, more than 10,000 new images of the Faroe Islands were created.

The story that the Faroe Islands had revived the world’s greatest artists caught the world press, and more than 250 international news articles were written about the initiative. In total, this reached out to media with a total readership of more than 150 million. It was not only possible to get the paintings at the Faroe Islands Art Museum. The exhibition became one of the most visited in the museum’s history with 60% more visitors than the same period the year before.