Ben Bogart | As our gaze peers off into the distance, imagination takes over reality...
Sessional faculty member Ben Bogart's generative site-specific public artwork is installed at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre Plaza through March 2017.
The relation between the world as we see it and the world as we understand it to be is all wrapped up in abstraction, the act of emphasizing some details in order to dispense with others. Ben's artistic interest in abstraction and computation is an interest in the world as it is versus the world as we read into and conceptualize it. As our gaze peers off into the distance, imagination takes over reality… is a site-specific public artwork that uses a photographic image of the surrounding site as raw material.
The bottom of the image shows this imperfect photographic illusion, a proxy of objective reality, that becomes increasingly abstracted towards the top. The abstraction is a proxy for the constructive powers of imagination and is the result of a machine learning process that rearranges colour values according to their similarity. The imaginary structure presented in this image is both an emergent composition and an exposition of the implicit structure of reality. The image is a representation of place (as a physical location at the site of installation) and non-place (as an ambiguous and emerging structure under constant renewal). The viewer’s experience of the tension between ambiguity and reality mirrors the mind’s constant attempt to bridge experience and truth.
Commissioned as part of the series Coastal City for the 25th Anniversary of the City of Vancouver Public Art Program and produced in partnership with Vancouver Civic Theatres. The installation, located at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre Plaza, will be on display until March, 1, 2017.