Todd R. Forsgren

Bayer Filter Array Garden, 

Acrylic Panels and Astroturf, 2014-2022.

Last summer Mika dreamt of a red and green and blue fence. She saw it extending across a wide river. It was lumpy and formless in an impossible way. At the time, she was also researching Carl Andre and the Japanese garden at Tofuku-ji, and our conversation shifted from her dream and to her research. I remember when I first saw the grid of Tofuku-ji‘s west garden, when I was an undergraduate in Intro to East Asian Art, with Professor Clifton Olds. The garden consists of a grid of billowing bright green moss and hard edged granite squares. It was designed by Mirei Shigemori in 1939, when Carl Andre was just four-years-old.

Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, these images collided. I saw a Bayer color array filter covering the earth. This mosaic of red, green and blue that is used in billions of digital cameras was extending in every direction. This pattern has been used to take trillions of digital photographs. Each square gathers data for just one color channel: red, green, or blue. Algorithms fill in the other two channels based on values from neighboring pixels, creating full color images. These intricate algorithms normally work quite well, but sometimes the data is unclear the camera starts to guess. The result of this is what we call digital “noise.”

Bayer Color Filter Array Garden is a huge physical version of this pattern. Though quite clear to the human eye, the edges between colors can start to confuse a camera, it begins to see noise caused by the quick change in color. The image breaks down more and more as the size of the squares of the grid approach the size of a camera’s pixels. In this case, each of my sculpture’s squares are about 1/4 the size of a pixel of resolution in USGS satellite maps. So my garden will confuse the hell out of those satellites, as they try to peer down into our lives.