Sarah Meyohas - Cloud of Petals

2017

Artists: Sarah Meyohas · Year: 2017 · Medium: Photography and performance, 100,000 individually-photographed rose petals · Substrate: Sixteen workers photographing individual rose petals at Bell Works over several weeks; the resulting dataset of 100,000 images; neural-network training on the photographs; prints, video, and neural-net output · Place: Holmdel, New Jersey, USA · Institution: 303 Gallery (exhibition); Bell Works (production site, former Bell Labs building) Sarah Meyohas's Cloud of Petals (2017) staged, at the former Bell Labs complex in Holmdel, New Jersey, a multi-week performance in which sixteen workers photographed 100,000 individual rose petals against a white background, one petal per photograph, for exhibition as a dataset and as artistic raw material. The workers were hired specifically for the project; the photographs were produced in a gallery-like setting that visitors could observe; the resulting photographic archive was exhibited at 303 Gallery as prints and video. A subsequent phase of the project trained a neural network on the rose-petal photographs and produced generated images of rose petals that did not exist. The piece's location at Bell Works is specifically resonant. The former Bell Labs building, site of BEFLIX, Pixillation, Studies in Perception I, and dozens of other foundational computer-art works from the 1960s, now houses offices and exhibition space. Meyohas's choice to produce Cloud of Petals there placed her project inside a specific art-historical lineage: computational work at the same address where computational art began. Cloud of Petals anticipated, in 2017, the subsequent AI-dataset-art practice that Anna Ridler's Myriad (Tulips) would make canonical in 2018. Meyohas's project is larger in scale (100,000 images vs. Ridler's 10,000) and earlier in date; it is less widely cited, partly because its deployment on 303 Gallery's physical exhibition circuit was more conventional-art-world than AI-art-world. The dataset itself, tokenized as part of Meyohas's earlier Bitchcoin project, bridges pre-NFT conceptual practice and the AI-art era. Lore The Bell Works building, Eero Saarinen's 1962 modernist masterpiece that originally housed Bell Labs' Holmdel division, was renovated in the 2010s as a mixed-use complex. Meyohas's choice to produce Cloud of Petals there was explicitly in dialogue with the building's computer-art history. The 303 Gallery exhibition of the project was in fall 2017. The resulting rose-petal photographs remain in Meyohas's archive and are periodically licensed for machine-learning research applications. Sources • Meyohas, Sarah, sarahmeyohas.com • 303 Gallery, Cloud of Petals exhibition records (2017) • Bell Works Holmdel, institutional records