Ben Bogart
Most Recent Affiliation:
- Independent
Location:
- Canada
Bio:
SIGGRAPH Asia 2020
Images are traces of cognition that betray mechanisms that allow us to generate internal representations of the world. Images allow us to reflect on how we categorize and conceptualize every unique moment of embodied life. At the root of my artistic enquiry is the notion that subjects and objects are mutually constructive. As subjects, we read into the world and ignore variation to attend to abstract aspects of objects that are as much a function of our imagination as they are of the world independent of us.
In my practise I use computational systems, image-making and empirical knowledge to examine the co-constructive nature of subjects and objects. I build Machine Subjects that manifest foundational processes that carve imaginary boundaries into the underlying continuity of the world. My machines categorize, organize and reduce the infinite complexity of the world as independent of thought. Machine Subjects participate in a process of abstraction that breaks sensed structures into atomic particles that serve as the raw material from which new structures are constructed. The resulting ‘mental’ images are of the world—their mechanisms uncover underlying statistical truths, but they are also of us —they depend on projections of subjective imagination.
At the core of my practise is an examination of the relation between humanity (in particular brains and mental processes) and computational systems that we increasingly use to model and extend our intellectual capacities. I am interested in an examination of the technical and cultural implications of seeing ourselves through the lens of computation as we increasingly offload ‘intelligent’ tasks to machines.
