Sheffield Park

Daniel Ambrosi

Date: 2023

Medium: Ambient-lit dye-sub fabric print

Dimensions: 182.9 x 182.9 cm

Edition: Edition of 3 (#1/3)

Daniel Ambrosi is a California-based visual artist specialising in digital and AI-augmented art. He studied at Cornell University, where he received a Bachelor of Architecture and a Masters in 3D Graphics. During the 40 years since graduating, he has practised digital art, and starting in 2015, with engineering assistance from Joseph Smarr (Google) and Chris Lamb (NVIDIA), developed an enhanced version of Google’s ‘DeepDream’ technology, that has allowed him to create his large-scale immersive Dreamscape series.

Ambrosi’s practice is deeply informed by the history of landscape painting, finding particular inspiration in the works of the grand format landscape artists of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and the later nineteenth-century Hudson River School artists.

Ambrosi’s works have been shown in exhibitions and art fairs across the United States and in Europe; his work has recently been acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art (MoCDA), and in 2019 he was a finalist of the Lumen Prize for Art and Technology.

Sheffield Park belongs to the body of work in which Ambrosi turned to the landscapes of Capability Brown, photographing ten English properties over the course of a year. Brown was engaged at Sheffield Park in East Sussex from about 1776 by John Baker Holroyd, later the first Earl of Sheffield, and the upper lakes are his, though what a visitor sees now owes as much to Arthur Gilstrap Soames, who from 1909 planted the tupelos and maples that give the garden its autumn colour. The place is therefore already a composite, three centuries of intention laid over one another, which is a condition the Dreamscapes share.

The method reinforces it. Ambrosi photographs a landscape repeatedly, waiting on light and weather, then builds the separate exposures into a single multi-layered file before applying his own version of the DeepDream process to it. What emerges holds together as a view from across a room and dissolves at close range into marks that behave like brushwork, so the picture is neither quite a photograph of Sheffield Park nor quite an invention, but an account of a designed landscape made by a process that is itself a kind of design.

Provenance

The artist's studio.

Exhibited

London, Robilant+Voena, Daniel Ambrosi. AI and the Landscapes of Capability Brown, 6 October - 15 December 2023.