bitforms gallery presents ReLensing, a solo exhibition by Jennifer & Kevin McCoy examining how vision is mediated by the tools and machines built to reproduce it, from camera optics to machine-learning models.
ReLensing spans four works exploring how vision is mediated by the tools built to reproduce it. Crystal Films mounts 3D-printed glass forms over screens looping fragments from Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai. The work develops Gilles Deleuze's concept of the 'crystal-image,' in which present experience and preserved memory become inseparable.
A forest warps into a sphere against a shifting filmed landscape in Lens Organic, a suite of black-and-white video that turns the act of looking inward.
Ghost Ship uses ordinary objects and cast shadow to produce a moving apparition in real space, leaving the mechanism visible. Depth Model works differently. It is a large-scale acrylic painting made with a custom-built plotter, its starting point a passage from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Stable Diffusion generated the whaling-ship imagery, including interpretations of the fictional Pequod, that the plotter translated into paint, drawing on a dataset built around Neo-Expressionism.
