As our gaze peers off into the distance,imagination takes over reality…Ben Bogart

As our gaze peers off into the distance, imagination takes over reality… — 2016Installation view.

As our gaze peers off into the distance,imagination takes over reality…Ben Bogart

As our gaze peers off into the distance, imagination takes over reality… — 2016Installation view.

As our gaze peers off into the distance,imagination takes over reality…Ben Bogart

As our gaze peers off into the distance, imagination takes over reality… — 2016Detail.

The relation between the world as we see it and the world as weunderstand it to be is all wrapped up in abstraction, the act of emphasizingsome details in order to dispense with others. My artistic interest inabstraction and computation is an interest in the world as it is versus theworld as we read into and conceptualize it. As our gaze peers off into thedistance, imagination takes over reality… is a site-specific public artworkthat uses a photographic image of the surrounding site as raw material.

The bottom of the image shows this imperfect photographic illusion, aproxy of objective reality, that becomes increasingly abstracted towardsthe top. The abstraction is a proxy for the constructive powers ofimagination and is the result of a machine learning process that rearrangescolour values according to their similarity. The imaginary structurepresented in this image is both an emergent composition and an expositionof 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 anambiguous and emerging structure under constant renewal). The viewer’sexperience of the tension between ambiguity and reality mirrors the mind’sconstant attempt to bridge experience and truth.

Artist StatementI’m interested in images as traces of cognition that betray thosemechanisms that allow us to generate internal representations of reality.Images allow us to reflect not only on how we attend to the world but alsohow we categorize and conceptualize every unique moment of embodiedlife. At the root of my artistic enquiry is an epistemological position wheresubjects and objects are considered mutually constructive. As subjects, weread into the world and ignore variation to focus on the abstract andquintessential aspects of objects. We classify by ignoring uniqueness andattending to sameness. This allows us to build the predictions and socialnorms that constitute the bulk of daily lived culture.

We build internal simulations of reality that mirror our constructed cultureand facilitate perception. Cognition requires simulations to resist theconstant barrage of independent reality, less we recoil into the abyss ofconstant flux, randomness and noise. This constant tension betweenobjects and subjects is the very core of our nature. We believe we are incontrol, but independent reality always creeps into our minds, throwing ourpredictions off and subverting our expectations. We live under the constantillusion that what we think is what is real.

I use computational systems to examine this power struggle betweensubjects and objects. I build machines that manifest these veryfoundational processes that ignore variation in order to emphasizesameness. My machines categorize, organize and reduce the infinitecomplexity of sensory reality. In doing so they participate in a process ofabstraction, breaking sensed reality into atomic particles that serve as thematerial from which new images are constructed. These ‘mental’ imagesare of the world—their mechanisms uncover underlying statistical truthsabout reality, but they are also of us—they are projections of boundedsubjective understanding.

In some of my recent work, machines learn from cultural artifacts ratherthan sensory reality. These artifacts are cultural products through which weunderstand reality and ourselves. In deconstructing, categorizing,predicting and reconstructing cultural artifacts, I emphasize the tensionbetween subjects and objects. The machine is both an alien subjectattempting to understand our culture and a cultural object that manifestsour understanding of ourselves.

BiographyBen Bogart is a Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist working withgenerative computational processes (including physical modelling, chaos,feedback systems, evolutionary computation, computer vision andmachine learning) and has been inspired by knowledge in the naturalsciences (quantum physics and cognitive neuroscience) in the service of anepistemological enquiry. Ben has produced processes, artifacts, texts,images and performances that have been presented at academicconferences and art festivals in Canada, the United States of America, theUnited Arab Emirates, Australia, Turkey, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Brazil,Hong Kong, Norway and Spain. He has been an artist in residence at theBanff Centre (Canada), the New Forms Festival (Canada) and at Videotage(Hong Kong). His research and practise have been funded by the SocialScience and Research Council of Canada and the Canada Council for theArts.

Acknowledgements:Commissioned as part of the series Coastal City for the 25th Anniversary ofthe City of Vancouver Public Art Program and produced in partnership withVancouver Civic Theatres.

Exhibition HistoryInstalled in the Queen Elizabeth Theatre Plaza from October 2016 to March2017.