Description
*Infinite Petals* is the most recent digital body of work by Sarah Meyohas, building on almost a decade of work with artificial intelligence and crypto assets. The artist has built upon her past work to train an AI model—referencing a dataset of 100,000 physical rose petals—in order to generate endless, new, and unique petals to be created as NFTs on the blockchain.
This series is a continued exploration of algorithmic beauty and the phenomenon of emergence within both natural and manmade systems. The physical petals are transformed into gridded arrangements of interpolating digital petals that behave according to algorithms of varied complexity—checkerboards, concentric squares, and John Conway’s Game of Life, as initial inspirations. Each of the GAN’s (Generative Adversarial Network) individual petals consists of 512 dimensions, producing an incomprehensible latent space mirroring the vastness of today’s machine intelligence and our digital world.
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This work stems from an earlier project in 2017, when Meyohas initiated Cloud of Petals. For that project, sixteen male workers gathered to photograph 100,000 rose petals—one by one—at the site of the former Bell Labs in New Jersey, where innovations such 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. The workers set aside one petal per rose that they considered the most beautiful and placed it in a press—preserving 3,291 petals as physical artifacts. These preserved petals went on to back Bitchcoin, Meyohas’s art-backed cryptocurrency which initially launched in 2015.
Documenting this performance on 16mm film, Cloud of Petals traces beauty and subjectivity within the systems of automation and artificial intelligence. The massive dataset compiled is also used to map out an AI algorithm that learns to generate endless, new, and unique petals through a series of virtual worlds. Through virtual reality experiences, this metaphorical network of endless petals falls like rain around the viewer, playing on the notions of augmented reality, data, and our valuations of beauty.
Early versions of Infinite 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.
Infinite Petals is a series of 3,291 unique video artworks. Each piece is a dynamic video output that evolves over time through a series of sequences defined by a specific visual pattern, a carefully paired color combination, and a set duration. Additional defining traits include varying grid sizes and occasional glitch effects, all layered within a structured rarity system.