TechLab at Surrey Art Gallery

Opening Reception | Saturday, April 14, 6:30 - 9pm

Part of the Capture Photography Festival, the Surrey Art Gallery presents Watching and Dreaming, an exhibition of work by media artist and ECU sessional faculty member Ben Bogart.

Watching and Dreaming is a body of work where machines deconstruct and reconstruct cinematic depictions of AI. The work questions the discontinuity between waking and dreaming and investigates the role of imagination in the construction of perception.

What is watching? Cognitive mechanisms impose structure on reality in the form of imaginary categories that inform prediction and recognition. At the same time, the complexity of reality constantly challenges understanding. Cognition determines the most essential and salient properties of reality, but those properties are context dependent. What are the mechanisms that allow us to recognize patterns and regularity in the noise and complexity of observable reality? How do we integrate the continuous flow of information into a cohesive world-view?

These are some of the questions at the centre of this artistic inquiry by media artist Ben Bogart. Initiated in 2014, the Watching and Dreaming series is the result of statistically oriented machine learning and computer vision algorithms attempting to understand popular cinematic depictions of artificial intelligence by breaking apart and reconstructing them. The machines’ understanding is manifest in their ability to recognize, and eventually predict, the structure of the films they watch. The images produced are the result of both the system’s projection of imaginary structure and the structure of the films themselves.