Azalea Walk Dreamscape

Steeped in the history of art and technology, “Azalea Walk Dreamscape” (Central Park, NYC) was originally commissioned as a 96” x 144” fabric light box for “9e2,” a juried art fair held in Seattle in October 2016 commemorating the 50th anniversary of “9 Evenings,” a seminal art+tech event held at the Armory in New York City in 1966. After six months on tour in Seattle, including three months at Seattle City Hall, this artwork spent two years installed in Google’s NYC flagship office in Chelsea and was the featured art piece on display during my art+tech talk at Google-NYC in July 2017, which can still be viewed on the “Talks at Google” YouTube channel. This artwork was also the basis for the wraparound cover of the bestselling textbook, “Deep Learning” by Ian Goodfellow, best known as the inventor of GANs. This cover art was subsequently renewed for all international editions of the book. “Azalea Walk Dreamscape” fuses computational photography and artificial intelligence; specifically, it consists of a 63-shot, 295+ megapixel HDR panorama I captured in Central Park in April 2013 that was ‘interpreted’ by a proprietary enhanced version of Google’s “DeepDream” AI software in January 2016. Original soundscape design © Kevin Barnard 2020 (San Francisco, CA)