Cloud of Petals

At the site of the former Bell Labs, sixteen workers photograph 100,000 individual rose petals. The massive dataset they compile is used to map out an artificial intelligence algorithm that learns to generate new unique petals forever.

  • Cloud of Petals Trailer
  • Rose petals cannot digitize themselves. At the site of the former Bell Labs, sixteen workers gather to photograph 100,000 rose...

     

    Rose petals cannot digitize themselves. At the site of the former Bell Labs, sixteen workers gather to photograph 100,000 rose petals, one by one. Human hands must individually open the flower, pick the petal, place it under the lens, press the shutter, and upload the image to the cloud. The workers set aside one petal per rose that they consider most beautiful and put it in a press—preserving it as a physical artifact. From this trove of images, an artificial intelligence algorithm emerges, allowing for the creation of new, unique petals forever.

  • “Staggering in scope, this sprawling, indexical project marries the disparate realms of ephemeral nature and digitized reality. “ 

    - Molly Simon, Flaunt Magazine
  • Shot on 16mm film, Cloud of Petals traces beauty and subjectivity within the systems of automation and artificial intelligence. Inside... Shot on 16mm film, Cloud of Petals traces beauty and subjectivity within the systems of automation and artificial intelligence. Inside... Shot on 16mm film, Cloud of Petals traces beauty and subjectivity within the systems of automation and artificial intelligence. Inside...

    Shot on 16mm film, Cloud of Petals traces beauty and subjectivity within the systems of automation and artificial intelligence. Inside the static confines of the once-modern but now-shut- tered Bell Labs, the place where the world’s brightest minds came together to invent the future, Sarah Meyohas has captured a haunting vision, punctuated by arresting visuals—at one point, a live python is let loose amid the piles of petals. And above all, it tracks the transformation of these most elemental markers of color—the bloomlets of flowers—into nothing but data, ones and zeros. The cloud of petals sprawled in the building eventually becomes a cloud of pixels.

  • “The result is a fever dream, a deconstruction or reimagination that’s oddly reminiscent of our experience in the digitized, surveilled, endlessly categorized world. “

    - Paul Maziar, Oregon Arts Watch
  • The petals undergo yet another transformation through a series of virtual reality worlds. Cloud of Petals VR, presents Meyohas’ metaphorical... The petals undergo yet another transformation through a series of virtual reality worlds. Cloud of Petals VR, presents Meyohas’ metaphorical... The petals undergo yet another transformation through a series of virtual reality worlds. Cloud of Petals VR, presents Meyohas’ metaphorical...

    The petals undergo yet another transformation through a series of virtual reality worlds. Cloud of Petals VR, presents Meyohas’ metaphorical network of petals across multiple worlds. Placed within the blank void of the digital plane, three-dimensional animated petals fall like rain around the viewer in one world or travel in an eternal cylindrical tube in another. The pixelated images are immersive, comforting, and dreamlike. They evoke physical, embodied processes such as memory and sensual perception, while also being representative of an unbounding language of code capable of navigating every aspect of the infinite space that is our digital world. 

  • "Celebrated or critiqued, contemporary art is a world where a thousand flowers bloom – but a thousand is not enough for Sarah Meyohas, who took ten thousand rose petals and sent them scattering across the worlds of art, technology, and finance, tainting sterile steel and glass, symbols of technological purity, with the scent of the garden and boudoir, juxtaposing clinical modernity with lush sensualism, like a body, gorgeously draped over an examining table, exposing itself for the eyes of desire and not the probe of inquiry, and thus confounding the doctor, who, conditioned and professionally obligated to see naked human flesh as a site of medical malformation, must confront a rapidly beating heart and the pulse of vital warmth. This seductive clashing of worlds that seem so separate through simple physical objects, in this case that epitome of floral symbolism, the rose, is a characteristic of Meyohas’ work, which has from the beginning challenged and redefined space by inscribing it with foreign bodies." - Samuel Loncar, Ascending to the Cloud