20 photographs, and then photograph the resulting installations. The final works are displayed as prints on frosted transparencies in the 14 niches that appear as light boxes. This process of deconstructing and reconstructing the space gives birth to a new architectural reality that is “labyrinthine" in nature, both perceptively and mentally. These spatial images hanging in the light boxes interfere with the gallery's actual space and create a sense of disorientation. The juxtaposition of forms within the boxlike structures also creates a hybridity that can be experienced as both a psychological and a physical maze. The sequence of these niches creates the syntax for the exhibition. Similar to artificial intelligence, which is able to construct an image through "observing" millions of examples to distill an image, viewers find themselves studying, searching, and playfully trying to decode the images that compose each nichebox. Wegner and Nisim’s work process echoes the dialogue between machine and human as they "stack" numerous visual details and then continue with a process of editing, cleaning, distilling, and clarifying. On the concrete wall opposite the arcade gallery, a video is projected (4:05 minutes), based on the same raw materials as the images in the niches. In this piece, the artists breathe movement into the still images through artificial intelligence and create a visual journey along the concrete structure of the campus at large. The familiar photographed spaces undergo a transformation: walls gape into imagined spaces, columns elongate, and new spaces emerge. This process creates a sense of displacement in the familiar structure or a continuous dream-like state, where the familiar space loses its permanence and reality, inviting the viewer to wonder about its material stability and the changes occurring within it. The exhibition presents different layers of dialogue: between mass, light, and shadow; between different artistic languages foreign to each other; and between manual studio labor versus digital space. In the creative process, the artists invite the image generator to blur spatial boundaries and to create a visual dialogue with the two main architectural elements of the gallery space: the arcade and the curved concrete wall. The architectural complex of the Open University campus designed by Ada Karmi – which includes the botanical garden, patio, vegetation adorning the buildings and concrete walls from the outside and the niches and transitional spaces inside the buildings – is sampled through its photographs and fed into the image generator. This creates a chain of
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy Mjk0MjAwOQ==