Cloud of Petals
16 mm film transferred to digital 4K video, sound, 31:22 minutes, 2014
Private collection
In Cloud of Petals Sarah Meyohas makes visible the human labor typically hidden within our digital systems. At the historic Bell Labs—birthplace of the transistor and numerous computing innovations—16 workers methodically photographed 100,000 rose petals one by one. Following a precise protocol, they opened flowers, selected petals, captured images, and uploaded them to cloud storage. The petals in this data set would go on to train a machine learning system that generates artificial petals, seen in the work Infinite Petals nearby.
Documented on 16-millimeter film, this performance reveals that even our most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems begin with human hands and human choices. Workers preserved one petal per rose they deemed the most beautiful, creating a physical archive of 3,291 petals that embodies human aesthetic preferences. As rose petals transform into digital data, nature converts into the binary digital language of ones and zeros and human value judgments become codified into seemingly objective digital systems.
The ability of a computer to simulate human intelligence by performing tasks such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and understanding language. AI systems can analyze data, recognize patterns, make predictions, and adapt their behavior based on experience.