Rêverie Reset is a system that expands on Yan Lei’s practice of dissolving images into concepts. A large-scale installation makes use of cutting-edge computational systems and networking technologies in order to reaffirm the artist’s notion of the artificiality of representation and the irrelevance of the image.
Each of the sixteen displays is networked to a system programmed to constantly show images submitted by the audience through their phones and from a local database. Every time an image is uploaded to the system, the software processes it by calculating its average pixel color while the local artificial neural network describes the image, textually, in human-like terms.
Lei constantly inquires into the cultural relevance of the image, recursively questioning the relevance implicit in the act of representation, while emphasizing the superfluous nature of the painted image. One could refer to Yan Lei’s creative process as a destructive practice, one closer to conceptualism; layers of ideas superposed over visual expression, an action that reduces realistic representations into abstract monochromes.
Project Credits:
- 北京技艺云文化有限公司 Beijing jishu & Art Culture Co., Ltd.
