Sarah Meyohas

In August 2016, 10,000 roses of different colors and varieties were placed in the atrium of the former Bell Labs, USA. It was the work of sixteen men to photograph the petals and turn them into a dataset. The workers set aside the petals they considered most beautiful, which were pressed to create a physical subset. The impartial mechanics of the camera turned petals to pixels, bits of color. The petals from which electronic pulses detach converting and converging as pixels; the transmission of information — a sustained set of acts. Messages come in and out of the theater of digits. Once the process of photographing was completed, the 100,000 were used as inputs to a machine learning algorithm that generated new, digital petals.

New, unique petals can be generated forever. Surfaces enfolding in movement in the luminous fibers of the screen.

This process is called an artificial neural network. This is a collection of artificial neurons. Each neural unit is connected with many others, and links can be enforcing or inhibitory in their effect on the activation state of connected neural units. These systems are self-learning and trained, rather than explicitly programmed. But the metaphor for the human brain is in fact misplaced. We will never find an image of a petal stored inside the human brain. Seeing something in its absence is far less accurate than seeing something in its presence. If we could take a picture of the 86 billion neurons in the mind and then simulate the state of those neurons in a computer, that vast pattern would mean nothing outside the body of the brain that it produced. Whereas computers can maintain exact copies of petals that can persist unchanged forever, even if the power has been turned off — the brain maintains our mind only as long as it remains alive.

The process resulted in a 16 mm film and photographs, to be exhibited at pact.

In her work across media, Sarah Meyohas (French-American, born 1991) uses networks of information, power, value, and communication. Most spaces are shaped by the flow of desire through matrices of thought; this is the site of her work. Her 2015 cryptocurrency Bitchcoin and recent Stock Performance at 303 Gallery in New York have been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Wired, Vice, Fortune, Artspace, and The Atlantic, and she has appeared on CNBC, PBS, and CBC. She has been named 30 under 30 by Forbes Magazine.

Meyohas holds a B.A. in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in finance from the Wharton School, and in 2015 received an M.F.A from Yale University. Her home in New York is her eponymously named gallery.