Jennifer and Kevin McCoy: ReLensing Takes Apart the Machines That See

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy closed ReLensing at bitforms gallery in New York on October 17, at the end of a run that began on September 10. The show gathered sculpture, video, installation and painting around a single question: how seeing is shaped by the machines built to reproduce it, from glass and cameras to shadows and machine learning models. In its final week the gallery released a walkthrough with the artists, and Kevin McCoy added: "we can talk you through the show, but go see it in person if you can."

At its center was the Crystal Films series. Glass forms, made by 3D printing, sit directly over screens that loop fragments of Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai, so the moving image is refracted through the sculpture, recalling an era when projection depended on the physical arrangement of glass and light. The series takes its cue from Gilles Deleuze's crystal image, the moment when the present and preserved memory occupy the same picture. Each video is choreographed to its own glass form.

Around it, Lens Organic is a suite of black and white video in which a forest warps into a sphere that hovers against filmed landscape, and Ghost Ship conjures a moving apparition from ordinary objects, shadow and light, with the whole apparatus left in view. Depth Model is a large acrylic painting made with a custom built plotter. The artists began from a passage of Moby-Dick, prompted Stable Diffusion for whaling ships, including Melville's Pequod, and had the plotter translate them into paint, with software that draws on a dataset built from art history to study Neo-Expressionism.

Showing the machinery has long been their method, and it reaches back to the chain. On May 2, 2014, the duo's code generated animation Quantum was registered on the Namecoin blockchain, and the next day Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash presented it at Rhizome's Seven on Seven conference at the New Museum, the experiment now remembered as the first NFT. Quantum was later minted on Ethereum in 2021. ReLensing turns the same attention from ownership to vision.

Sources

• ReLensing, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, bitforms gallery
• bitforms gallery on X: artists' walkthrough of ReLensing
• bitforms gallery on X: Crystal Films #7 (death) and the final days
• Kevin McCoy on X: go see it in person
• Another New World, Rhizome
• Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's Quantum, Le Random Generative Art Timeline
• Quantum leap: how a decade of NFTs has changed digital art, The Art Newspaper