Ben Bogart: Watching and Dreaming

Opening Reception: April 14 | 6:30−9pmArtists Conversation: June 2 | 2:30−4pm

Visit Surrey Art Gallery’s newest TechLab exhibit to see what a machine sees when it goes to the movies. In Watching and Dreaming, media artist Ben Bogart programs computers to “watch” classic sci-fi films by breaking them apart and reconstructing them. The resulting cinematic experience challenges viewers to consider the role science fiction plays in how we think about artificial intelligence and the constructed nature of our own perceptions. Ben Bogart: Watching and Dreaming launches April 14 and runs until June 10 as part of Surrey Art Gallery’s spring 2018 programming. The exhibition is presented as part of the Capture Photography Festival. Admission to Surrey Art Gallery is free.

As an artist and programmer, Bogart bridges the fields of art and science. Using complex software algorithms, his machines break the frames and sounds from three popular science fiction films into millions of image and audio fragments: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and Steven Lisberger’s TRON (1982). The computers group the fragments according to similarities in size and colour to reconstruct a resemblance of the original using this data. The results are abstract tapestries or collages where the viewer may be able to pick out familiar forms, characters, and props from the films such as the silhouette of a figure walking through a darkened streetscape or sitting on a bright red couch.

Dialogue, music, and sound effects blend together into shifting and halting soundscapes that parallel the mesmerizing imagery. Bogart says, “The images and sounds are just at the threshold of readability. The viewer constantly attempts to read the work as cinema, searching for narrative and structure. At some point, this search becomes overwhelming as the image ebbs and flows between readability and chaotic abstraction.”

The exhibition, comprised of three projected videos and three light boxes, provides a thought-provoking meditation on the increasingly blurry boundaries between humans and machines, the limits of cinema, and the future of art. Through his multisensory art, Bogart invites the gallery visitor to consider how machines can be a mirror through which to reflect on what it means to be human.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ben Bogart is a Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist working with generative computational processes including physical modelling, chaos, feedback systems, evolutionary computation, computer vision, and machine learning. His work has been inspired by the natural sciences, such as quantum physics and cognitive neuroscience. Bogart has produced processes, artifacts, texts, images and performances that have been presented at galleries, art festivals, and academic conferences around the world. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre (Canada), the New Forms Festival (Canada), and at Videotage (Hong Kong). Ben holds both master’s and doctorate degrees from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University.

RELATED EVENTS (admission is free)

Opening Reception

Saturday, April 14 | 6:30−9pm

Celebrate the opening of Ben Bogart: Watching and Dreaming, along with our other spring exhibitions Flow: From the Movement of People to the Circulation of Information and Elizabeth Hollick: Body Politic. A talk with exhibiting artist Elizabeth Hollick will start at 6:30pm. The reception at 7:30pm will include a performance by Chun Hua Catherine Dong in partnership with local collective AgentC Projects called “Undocumented”. Dong’s performance evokes the experience of migration, the regulation of borders, and aesthetics of administration.

Artists ConversationSaturday, June 2 | 2:30−4pm

Exhibiting artists Ben Bogart and Jim Bizzocchi will talk about their practices in a conversation facilitated by Surrey Art Gallery curator Jordan Strom. They’ll discuss the role of computer programming and image choices, generative art, ambient video, and the histories of abstraction in art and film.