A year ago, we were busy at Finch Lane Gallery installing our 35×35 exhibit, a showcase for Utah’s young artistic talent. Then the closures hit. (The exhibit only opened to the public, in a limited way, in June.) A year since the closures, we have decided to check in with the artists from 35×35 to see what they’re working on now in our WIP feature.
Thomas Cole’s “The Oxbow” + petrochemical plant
The combinations seem perverse, unholy — Claude Monet’s “Poppy Field at Giverny” and a plastic manufacturing plant; a delightful landscape painting by LeConte Stewart and a decomissioned chemical agent disposal facility in Tooele; a Georgia O’Keefe and the Facebook Data Center in Eagle Mountain. But the results are somehow mesmerizing.
They are works from Justin Watson’s “Synthetic Nature” series, where he trains Generative Adversarial Networks (neural networks) to reconstruct and mix images through a training/identification process. “The works are framed around the sublimity of famous art historical landscapes interwoven with the current reality of human designed manufacturing, data harvesting and resource extraction facilities,” the Salt Lake City artist says.
“The series is one integral aspect of an exhibition that examines how our perception of history shifts, expands, erases and interpellates through new media.”
Implementing neural networks has been part of Watson’s practice for a long time: in graduate school (University of Utah, ,2014-2016) he was running Convolution Neural Networks to register and recreate texts based on his writings. “I feel this is a continuation and evolution of those crude initial investigations. I view this series as one piece of the larger scope and concept of the exhibition; the curiosity of synthetic mark+image making has been circulating through the contemporary artbworld for some time, but I am more interested in critiquing synthetic vision and how it alters human perceptions of reality and leads to historical mitosis and distortion.”
You can view more of his work at instagram.com/justin-.-watson and http://justinwatson.com.
This 15 Bytes feature talks with artists about what is on their “easel” right now.
Categories: Visual Arts | WIP
Congratulations man!
I don’t understand the desire to blend the DNA of human greed and carelessness with the survival-leaning instincts of Nature. The work is a band-aid on the ugliness of modern life . . . a misty-eyed camouflage on catastrophe. As for the text, anything that is true can be said so that anyone can understand it.
The natural order has a mechanism for dealing with those creatures who refuse to fit in: extinction. We may take 90% of the present species with us, but worse has happened to life on Earth. In a few million years, new species will evolve that will be unlike what’s here now and will have no memory of us. Maybe they will fare better.
I’m a bit confused how you are not interpreting this as related to Anthropocene-caused extinction events and your indication that “We may take 90% of the present species with us, but worse has happened to life on Earth. In a few million years, new species will evolve that will be unlike what’s here now and will have no memory of us. Maybe they will fare better…” is something I’m not even going to address as this reads as extraordinarily obtuse and shrugs off all human accountability.
I’m also a tad confused when you state it as my desire (I’m not sure where this is indicated in the text) to blend “survival-leaning instincts of Nature” with human greed and carelessness and that the work is a “band-aid on the ugliness of modern life…a misty-eyed camouflage on catastrophe…” wherein the entire point is to show two divergent realities co-existing through the compression of time (the past idyllic vision + the catastrophe of the present) as generated through computational visual analysis (artificial intelligence).
See, I suspected that if you wanted to, you could explain yourself in plain English. I wrote—pretty clearly, I think—that natural processes will cause humans to go extinct if they continue to do as they have done, a fact that I consider welcome given human indifference to the creatures that share the planet, even though if that occurs humans will probably be among the last to succumb to their own poison. I’ll happily apologize for my diction if you’ll explain how I’m supposed to understand that this — ‘Justin Watson’s “Synthetic Nature” series, where he trains Generative Adversarial Networks (neural networks) to reconstruct and mix images through a training/identification process’— carries the same clear meaning as ‘I’m a bit confused how you are not interpreting this as related to Anthropocene-caused extinction events.’ (It’s because I can’t understand the first sentence, where the second is clear as clean water.
My students used to frequently begin a sentence ‘Don’t misunderstand me, but . . .’ and I would always write next to it, ‘If you don’t want me to misunderstand, you need to write what you mean clearly.’ If you mean to make art that strives to say something about the real world, at least make sure you say what you mean.
The sad thing here is, I think . . . or I guess . . . that you and I agree on the grotesque reality of the Anthropocene Era. Yet we’re arguing about stylistics while plastic manufacturers have plans in place to triple the output of their poison by 2050 (there’s specific fact that doesn’t allow for much quibbling). I’d like to be able to write about your art the way I have about artists whose feelings about nature are neither ambiguous nor ambivalent.
Thank you for your clarification. I know all too well about the complications of plastics manufacturing and processing as I own and operate a recycling facility. My problem was that you were critiquing the concept based on a response to an inquiry that specifically listed a request for works in progress and any involved processes. As this is still being developed, I was not interested in sharing an extensive project statement at this time and instead shared the process. We do share views on the harsh reality of the Anthropocene. I witness the compounding affects every day.
Thank you, Justin. After contributing to fifteen-plus of 15-Bytes’ 20 years I am no stranger to the accidents of online production under deadline. My queries should have been directed to the staff, and they would be if I didn’t know how few individuals perform this labor of love, or how poorly they are compensated (when they are compensated at all). I thought your work was environmental at heart—the environment being another heart-felt concern—and I hope that will become more clear as your work is shown more and seen more, as it should be. My only goal is to introduce good art to a wider audience while making it more approachable. I hope we’ve done that here.
Keep up the innovative and original work.