A Brown Bear Plays Grand Piano in a Park in Helsinki

Early this autumn we went to see what the former parking lot of Finlandia Hall looks like these days. It was green. And there was a grand piano. There wasn’t a bear, though — even if in Helsinki of the 2020s you can spot all sorts of semi-tame wild animals. So we asked Google Gemini to add a piano-playing bear to the scene. This is what it came up with. Pretty cute, right?

Our proposal for the working groups pondering how to enliven a city swallowed by the winter darkness: more musically gifted bears in Helsinki!

What would Helsinki look like through the eyes of a South American Nobel laureate? We asked AI to bring the city to life through the lens of magical realism.