Stourhead
Date: 2023
Medium: LED perimeter-lit dye-sub fabric print
Dimensions: 198.1 x 365.7 cm
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.
Stourhead belongs to the body of work in which Ambrosi photographed ten English properties laid out in the eighteenth century, and of all of them Stourhead is the one that was conceived as a picture in the first place. Henry Hoare, a banker rather than a professional improver, dammed the Stour in the 1740s and set Henry Flitcroft’s temples around the water he made, working from the paintings by Claude Lorrain that he and his circle collected, so that the circuit of the lake delivers one composed view after another in a deliberate sequence. Ambrosi’s subject here is therefore a landscape already standing at one remove from nature, which gives his own procedure something firmer to work against than a park does.
That procedure runs in the same direction. He photographs the place repeatedly, waiting on light and weather, assembles the exposures into a single multi-layered file, and then applies his own version of the DeepDream process to the whole. Held in a self-illuminating panel close to two metres by three and a half, the result reads as a panorama from across a room and breaks down at close range into marks that behave like brushwork, which returns the eighteenth century’s painted garden to painting by a route no one in it could have imagined.
Provenance
The artist's studio
Exhibited
London, Robilant+Voena, Daniel Ambrosi. AI and the Landscapes of Capability Brown, 6 October - 15 December 2023.