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Temporary artwork installed at City Hall

Central Park Azalea Walk Dreamscape by artist Daniel Ambrosi on view thru February 21, 2017 at City Hall

For the next three months, a new artwork will illuminate the lobby of City Hall outside – the Bertha Knight Landes room. The large-scale artwork, Central Park Azalea Walk Dreamscape by artist Daniel Ambrosi, is 12 x 8-feet and consist of 63 photographs printed on SEG tension fabric that were stitched together into one image. The artwork that gives the viewer the sensation of being able to enter the landscape.

daniel_cityhallThe artist states: My “grand format” landscape images that result from computational photography are inspired by the 19th century master paintings of the Hudson River School and by the great romantic European landscape paintings that preceded them. Like those works, some of which reached 10 feet in width, I’ve endeavored to create uncannily immersive and idyllic scenic experiences that deliver both breadth and details. Thanks to custom modifications made to Google’s DeepDream software, it has become possible to imbue my giant landscape images with a stunning degree of wholly unexpected form and content that is only revealed upon close-up viewing. These “Dreamscapes” represent my attempt to remind myself (and others) that we are all actively participating in a shared waking dream, a dream that is on the precipice of considerable amplification by rapid advances in artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

About the artist:

Daniel Ambrosi is based in Half Moon Bay, California. Ambrosi has been exploring novel methods of visual presentation since graduating from Cornell University in 1984 with degrees in architecture and computer graphics. He is a Cornell National Scholar & Eschweiler Prize Recipient and began his career with NBBJ. Ambrosi’s latest work builds upon his previous experiments by adding a powerful new graphics tool to his artistic workflow; namely “DeepDream,” a technique evolved from Google engineers’ desire to visualize the inner workings of Deep Learning artificial intelligence models.

Central Park Azalea Walk Dreamscape Details:

ARTIST: Daniel Ambrosi

ENGINEERS: Joseph Smarr (Google) and Chris Lamb (NVIDIA)

STATS:

  • Number of Photos: 63 (7 wide x 3 high x 3 “deep”)
  • Resolution: 20123 x 13462 pixels (270+ megapixels)
  • Horizontal Field of View: ~240 degrees
  • Vertical Field of View: ~90 degrees
  • Medium: SEG Tension Fabric Structure (LED Perimeter Lighting)
  • Dimensions: 144” wide x 96” high