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