French-American conceptual artist Sarah Meyohas makes her debut on MakersPlace at the company’s first-ever visit to Art Dubai Digital taking place March 1-3. In a booth curated by Senior Director Jessica Marinaro, Meyohas will showcase Infinite Petals, a masterpiece featuring an infinite number of digital rose petals, created with a generative model trained on her own dataset of 100,000 physical rose petals. The work was most recently on view as part of Chanel Culture Fund’s new public art project, The Window, at the Time & Life building on Bruton Street, London.

Additionally, she will exhibit a selection of digital artworks from the Liquid Speculations, her renowned ongoing photographic series, which she creates in the studio using hidden cameras and two-way mirrors to create photographic illusions of mesmerizing infinite loops and perspectival tunnels extending into infinity. Each of the Liquid Speculations unique digital artworks is also available for acquisition as a framed C-print, in two sizes.

INFINITE PETALS

For Infinite Petals, Sarah Meyohas trained a GAN on a dataset of 100,000 physical rose petals to generate endless, new and unique petals. The dataset was compiled during the artist’s previous project Cloud of Petals, when sixteen male workers gathered to photograph the petals, one by one, at the site of the former Bell Labs in New Jersey, where such innovations as the transistor, silicon solar cell, and numerous programming languages underwent critical developments. Meyohas conceived a real-life algorithm which dictated that human hands must individually open the flower, pick the petal, place it under the lens, press the shutter, and upload the image to a server. These images were then used to train a GAN, or Generative Adversarial Network—a technology that, in 2017, was still in its infancy, significantly predating the contemporary boom in artificial intelligence. The workers also set aside one petal per rose that they considered the most beautiful and put it in a press—preserving 3,291 petals as physical artifacts. These petals went on to back Bitchcoin, Meyohas’s historic proto-NFT from 2015. 

In Infinite Petals, the physical petals are transformed into gridded arrangements of interpolating digital petals behaving according to algorithms of varied complexity: checkerboards, concentric squares, and John Conway’s Game of Life, to name a few. Each of the GAN’s individual petals consists of 512 dimensions, producing an incomprehensible latent space mirroring the vastness of today’s machine intelligence and our digital world. Infinite Petals is a continued exploration of algorithmic beauty and the phenomenon of emergence within both natural and manmade systems. Variations of the I_nfinite Petals_ have been exhibited at the Flint Institute of Arts and the Ming Contemporary Art Museum, and the short film documenting Cloud of Petals is in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, alongside two examples from Bitchcoin. Infinite Petals was recently on view (as part of Chanel Culture Fund’s new public art project, The Window, featuring a series of digital art installations visible 24 hours a day at the ground floor of the Time & Life building on Bruton Street, London. 

LIQUID SPECULATIONS

In February 2015, Sarah Meyohas launched a social token, Bitchcoin, a cryptocurrency which could be exchanged in perpetuity for her work. Meyohas backed each original Bitchcoin with a five inch by five-inch portion of her Speculations photographs. These works, created through the manipulation of physical reflective surfaces and water in a traditional photographic studio set-up, portrayed perspectival tunnels extending into infinity. The series is continued to this day, existing both as physical editions and unique NFTs on Ethereum. Functioning as a visual and poetic interpretation of the blockchain technology itself, they hold up a mirror to the alchemical ways in which value is created by the artistic gesture and embodied in art as a financial asset.