For her 2016 installation, Cloud of Petals, French-American artist Sarah Meyohas brought together nature and technology in a multimedia exhibition that explores our perception of what beauty means.

Cloud of Petals saw the atrium of the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex—a former research facility in New Jersey designed by renowned Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen in 1962—filled with roses of various colors. Over the course of four days, sixteen men took over the building—currently shuttered and undergoing redevelopment—and undertook the painstaking process of manually picking petals that they considered most beautiful to be photographed, capturing 100,000 rose petals; all images uploaded to a cloud and pressed, creating both digital and physical data sets.

The above 16mm film, a special edit of a longer piece cut exclusively for NOWNESS ties together the expansive range of media the full film covers—from photography and sculpture to digital files. “This film traces beauty and subjectivity within the systems of automation and artificial intelligence,” says Meyohas. “From the trove of images taken by the 'workers', an artificial intelligence algorithm is created; allowing for the creation of new, unique petals forever.”

Cloud of Petals is on show at Red Bull Arts, New York, through 10 December 2017.