Painted Cities-- New York | 2021
“Painted Cities" explores the subconscious and imaginative tool of machine intelligence to create the memory and dream state of a city through the fusion of motion and ink. The digital paintings are created using multiple forms of AI, especially Neural Style Transfer, to fuse Mohler's videos with ink, texture, and photographs. Mohler takes photographs of streets around the city or finds images with abstract textures and processes them to create visceral and abstract architectural studies. Something short of machine assisted hallucinations. The series originated from the desire to immortalize memories, specifically of cities Mohler had visited “The locations in the series “Painted Cities” are all places I’ve spent time in. Views of each city often resurface in dreams and desires when trying to escape the mundane pattern of everyday life. The cities in my work are actual places, but also a figurative representation of them during something of a dream-like state, an imaginative moment. An Ode to the presence a city has on a person. A tribute to the architecture, the people, and the culture.” All are slow and highly detailed 4k films, intended for passive viewing and complementary of space rather than fast and attention grabbing. The pieces for this series cover painted memories of New York, Rome, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Created specifically to experiment with gifting and selling video art intended to be displayed at large scale in the real world; Mohler hopes these pieces further the digital art movement and open the eyes of traditional collectors to digital mediums that are conceptual, thought provoking, and engaging even while living on a screen.