Shirley Wegner and Tal Nisim Curator: Carmit Blumensohn
Artists and photographers Shirley Wegner and Tal Nisim are engaged in an ongoing dialogue with a generative artificial intelligence platform. In the body of work presented here, they offer a fresh look at the existing structural relationships between indoor and outdoor, between an imagined space and a real one, and between handmade crafts and innovative technologies. Shirley Wegner and Tal Nisim explore the boundaries of perception and representation through the gaps that exist between human knowledge and the way artificial intelligence perceives the world.
Their process begins with a dialogue with the machine. The artists prompt the image generator to blur spatial boundaries and create a visual dialogue with key architectural elements of the gallery space: the arcade, and the curved concrete wall. The architectural ensemble of the Open University campus, designed by Ada Karmi, encompasses the botanical garden, the patio, and the vegetation on the exterior of the buildings. The space inside the building is dominated by concrete walls, niches, and various transitional spaces. These elements become raw material that the artists feed into the image generator. The use of generative artificial intelligence evokes yet a new layer of perception in the architectural space. Boundaries between inside and outside and between different parts of the building are blurred, as they challenge our ability to distinguish between stable and fixed spatial elements, and ones that shift and fluctuate before our eyes. The artists give new meaning to digital glitches inherent to the generative process; they interpret these glitches and errors in materials and physical form in the studio.
The fourteen tall niches nestled within the arcade are transformed into light boxes, showcasing a sequence of photographs printed on translucent surfaces. These images were created through a process of deconstructing and reconstructing the original space, using fragments of photographs of the building, painstakingly assembled in the studio. This process gives rise to a perplexing architectural reality, cognitively and physically disorienting. The spatial images in the light boxes intervene with the existing space, resulting in a disconcerting experience.
Across from the arcade gallery, on the massive concrete wall, a video is projected. The video was created with generative artificial intelligence, via a feedback loop. In this process, new spaces have emerged from within the building, hinting at hidden realities. Here and there, plant fragments appear in the cracks of the concrete wall, perhaps remnants of previous life cycles.
Shirley Wegner and Tal Nisim engage with the architectural complex and weave together fragments of reality and machine hallucinations.