Event: ROSES AT BELL by Artist Sarah Meyohas

On August 24th, artist Sarah Meyohas will place ten thousand roses of different colors and varieties in Bell Works. Every petal will be picked and photographed by sixteen temporary workers at individual stations arranged in the atrium on a floor pattern by Josef Albers, producing a digital data set. The workers will set aside the petals they consider most beautiful. Those will be taken to a private room, where another person will also select petals for their beauty, and press them to create a physical subset. Once the process of photographing is completed, the digital petals will be analyzed — the color and vibrance, shape and contour, pattern of the pixels — to cluster images and find links. The 200,000+ images will be used to create unique new digital petals by interpolation, or perhaps machine learning can reveal conclusions about beauty. In conjunction to the 10,000 Roses installation, a semi-narrative film will be shot on 16mm in the space, commenting on the end of the mechanical era and a new resurgence of the information era.

On Saturday, August 27th at 3 PM, Sarah Meyohas will give a brief artist talk.