Information Stream, Permanent installation at
Google Office, St. John’s Terminal, New York City, 2023

Information Stream is a 10-story, low-relief sculpture in the central stairwell of the building. It acts as the spine of the building, connecting the skylight on the top floor to the base of the building, which opened in 1934 as the southern terminus for New York's elevated West Side rail line (now known as the High Line).

Information Stream is a collaboration between lead artist Chester Dols @chetdols, machine learning specialist Gene Kogan, and the artists Sophie Kahn, Carlos Rosales-Silva @loloafterdark, Letha Wilson @letha.wilson, Maika’i Tubbs @maikaitubbs, and Olalekan Jeyifous @kidcadaver. Each artists’ individual contribution explores world-building through the lenses of biology, ecology, urbanism, gender/the body, and the Anthropocene. The CNC-carved, low-relief Information Stream uses water as a metaphor for information exchange, embodying Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. The piece also references the Minetta Brook, which, prior to industrialization, joined the Hudson River at this location. The piece makes visible what was hidden over 100 years ago—a rocky, freshwater stream.

Like the parlor game, “exquisite corpse,” the artists created digital artworks for Information Stream that were then fed into Kogan’s machine learning model. Each “rock” cluster, made of colored, laminated Valchromat MDF, is a singular contribution that represents the artists’ respective practices. The AI-generated images, made of UV prints on mirror-finished, polished metal, show reflective water flowing between the rocks.