Join us for a conversation between Matthew Ritchie and Sarah Schwettmann on the occasion of A Garden in the Machine, Ritchie’s debut solo show at James Cohan, at 48 Walker Street. Ritchie and Schwettman have collaborated since 2018 on cross-disciplinary projects that explore a type of machine learning known as generative adversarial networks (GANs), which treat images as data from which to develop new imagery -- in essence, a kind of surrealist image generator from which Ritchie builds the compositions in this exhibition.
This event is free and open to the public.
About Sarah Schwettmann
Sarah Schwettmann is a Research Scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. Schwettmann completed her PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and her work investigates generalizable representations for vision in biological and artificial neural networks.
Schwettmann is interested in creativity underlying the human relationship to the world: from the brain’s fundamentally constructive role in sensory perception to the explicit creation of experiential worlds in art. She sees this as a frontier for understanding intelligence and building intelligent machines. Schwettmann designed and co-teaches MIT’s first course on Vision in Art and Neuroscience, which you can learn more about here.
Matthew Ritchie: A Garden in the Flood, a major mid-career retrospective, will open on November 11 at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, TN. He was recently the 2018-21 Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist at MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology. Ritchie has exhibited internationally over the past two decades, including solo presentations at the CVAD Galleries at the University of North Texas (2021); Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, TX (2018); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2014); ZKM Karlsruhe (2012), and Barbican Theatre, London, UK (2012).