Please join us in the techlab for one last hurrah!!

Launch event and reception for the artists is from 2pm  to 4pm, 
Saturday, 24th January 2009 at Surrey Art Gallery,  13750 88th ave. Surrey.

The digital revolution has included the global proliferation of millions  of image-taking devices (such as digital cameras, video recorders,  cell phones, and PDAs) and the sharing of billions of images through  online networking and archival sites (such as Flickr). As this  democratization of digital technologies makes the ability to make  photographic images so ubiquitous, Glocal is interested in looking at  the implications of the changing roles and relations of images within  the field of visuality. Glocal is particularly interested in exploring  the construction and relevance of the “unique” or “originary” image in  relation to the multiple or “multitude”. How can an image retain its  ‘unique’ nature as resistance against being subsumed into the  multitude? How can we understand the nature of “uniqueness”? Does it  remain a relevant concept for digital image making? Through an  interactive installations as well as a series of on-line platforms,  Glocal examines the new digital lives of images.

Glocal has been in development for the past year, incubating in the  Surrey Art Gallery’s TechLab as an artist in residence project.  Starting from scratch, the team has developed software tools, and  hardware gadgets, and experimented with various prototypes of  presentation formats and interactivity models. At the same time, the  team has led various community engagement projects, built curriculum  for numerous high school and university workshops, and assembled a  large networks of volunteers, educators and supporters. For this  event, the Glocal artists will be presenting the culmination of their  research/creation. Viewers will be able to interact with the touch- table prototype that explores the aggregation within their 20,0000+ 
image archive, and view a series of large software-generated  photographic ’similarity structures’. These ’similarity structures’  imagine how an anthropologist might attempt to build relationships  between images within the archive. Using an algorithm which calculates  compositional similarity between images, elaborate maps and  phylogenetic trees are generated, modeling possible links between  images. These temporally unique visual structures attempt to examine  the complex relational environments that surround images in an online  space.

The Surrey Art Gallery is located at 13750 88 Avenue (at the corner of  King George Highway) in Surrey. Just 10 minutes from Surrey Central  Skytrain Station by bus. Link to google map : http://is.gd/g3ls

For more information please email info@glocal.ca .

New Glocal Camera Hack kits have been developed. Much like the originals, these kits are Arduino based camera triggers, but the mark 2 hack kit now contains an accelerometer and a light sensor to increase the possibilities of your photographic experiments. The camera can now be activated by a sudden bright light (for example, a door opening into a dark room), an absence of light (for example breaking a laser path), or by shakes, sudden movements, or tilt in axis.

By automating the firing of the camera, we can move away from images always being made at eye level. The use of these camera triggers allow us to capture images from new perspectives, and in new ways. By actually removing some human control from the equation, we open up possibilities for new and exciting images.

The kit is designed by artist Daniel Joliffe, and this download contains parts lists, assembly guides, schematics and everything you need to know in order to build one. Blank PCB’s are available from us,for free, so just contact us if you are intersted in one. Parts can obtained from Digikey or other online electronics vendors.

Photochallenge #8: Found Text and the Urban Life

Ends: Friday, December 12, 2008

Brief: Find words or text that appeal to you anywhere in your environment. Wait for “something interesting” to happen, with pedestrians, with light, with framing, with angles! Anything creative that strikes you.

In photo challenge #7, we asked you to find things that were “not quite right”. We were amazed by the various submissions that we received and began to think of how our project offers this amazing opportunity for street-level exposure to so many urban centres around the world. Photo challenge #8 has further exploration of this topic at it’s objective.

Street photography became possible in the early 20th century when advancements in technology made it possible to carry a hand-held camera on one’s body. There was much excitement in the ability to capture “everyday life” as the common man experienced it. Street photography allows us to consider how what we see everyday impacts what we know about the world. Considering text as a common thread in urban life adds a common thread from which to view many street photographers’ works.

In the photography of Walker Evans, the visuality of urban life reveals important cultural information about his early 20th century work. At the time of his black and white street photography, capitalism was very much changing the appearance of city streets as the ability to mass produce goods brought about consumerist culture. As we readily recognize, urban street signage dots the landscape:

New Orleans Street Corner, 1935

What does this photo tell us about the urban setting in which it was taken? We can extract a lot just through a quick glance: what language is spoken there, what kinds of products are consumed there, what kind of cars are driven there etc. etc.. Objectively, it’s also relevant to look at the scene as a whole and consider how drastic the advertising really is in relation to the entire scene. Only the fruits and vegetables in the shop window remind us of the natural world and the resources that many of our products are created from.

Later, Fred Herzog mostly documented the changing streets of Vancouver, a city on the west coast of Canada, revealing again, the almost-overwhelming presence of street signs and advertisements, as the city moved from “backwater town” to a world-class city with many desirable goods and services for its inhabitants.

The above photo, taken in Vancouver in 1968, brings colour into the visual spectrum of street photography. The viewer is bombarded by brightly coloured neon and back-lit signage, “games, guns, movies,” “western gym,” “washington.”  

Most street photographers at this time were still using black and white, while Herzog preferred to work in Kodachrome, and shot on slide film. Although unnoticed for years, his work is now recognized as an important body of historical photographs.  Today, the colours, font and designs of those streets signs are associated with forgotten signage in dilapidated and run-down neighbourhoods. The fact that his slide films were just recently developed into prints for exhibitions provides an extraordinary opportunity to look at “new” prints that contain outdated cultural information, including fonts and colours that we no longer associate with contemporary  city scenes.

Arcade, 1968

Herzog also created some interesting use of text in his street photography. One word in the photo below hangs in the frame of a very theatrical San-Francisco moment. What is it about the word “only” that continually piques our curiosity each time we look at it? Here, Herzog has selected a moment in time, well aware of the text that lingers in the top of the frame, something we’re hoping our photo challenge participants will consider as they go out looking for inspiration.

Vercruz 96

Glocal Project: Interactive Table Prototype from Glocal Project on Vimeo.

New versions of the Glocal Motion Sequence App, Multiple Exposure App and Long Exposure App have been released.  These updates fix a few issues when running the apps on Macs.  New features include an improved interface for loading and working with video files, as well as a built-in image browser for reviewing your images from within the application.

The new image broswer feature - with an image by artist and educator Greg Dawe

The Glocal Project is a massive contributive artwork. Two months before the launch of the project, we already have upwards of 8,000 submissions from more than 2,000 participants around the world.

One of the most challenging questions has been: how can we make sense of such a large collection of images?

Obviously the first place to start is to catalogue as much information as we can about each image. Some of this information is easy to gather: place, date, place, tags, and other basic information is readily available through Flickr. We’ve also written some simple scripts to record luminosity and to put together a colour pallette for each image. Perhaps most interestingly, we’ve also integrated compositional analysis software, which looks at each image and assigns it a ’signature’. This signature can then be compared against others in the database to find similar images. This is a very useful tool, since it allows us to find relationships between images that may not have been obvious to human analysis.

I began thinking about these image signatures as a kind of genotype – genetic information that describes each unique image. With that in mind, I wondered wether it would be possible to breed images! The process starts off simply – the image signatures are spliced together at two insertion points:

Sig 1: 1111|111111111111|111111

Sig 2: 2222|222222222222|222222

Child: 1111|222222222222|111111

We then take the child signature and run it through the similarity engine, looking for images in the Glocal pool that matched the child most closely. Happily, this process worked. Below, you can see the three images that result from ‘breeding’ the initial two images. In the offspring, we see the circular element from the parent image on the left in all three images. The most successful child here is the middle one, where we see both the light circular shape from the ‘egg’ and the colour abstraction from the image on the right.

This process can be repeated over generations. In the next image below, I’ve selected the two outside images and asked for images that could be their offspring. In almost all of the child images, we see the consistent circular image in the middle of the frame. There are a few outliers, which may have been imperfect matches – or, more interestingly, which may have picked up on ‘dormant’ portions of the image genotype from previous generations.

We can proceed through these ‘trees’ in a generational fashion, or we can diverge and back-breed. If you take a close look at the image at the top of this post (click to get a larger view), you will see that there is a fair amount of inter-generational mixing.

As this process continues, we can explore the relational landscape that exists in the Glocal pool, and in the process we construct ‘family trees’ which present a possible way in which the images could be related. I imagine an anthropologist, stumbling onto a box containing 8,000 images, might apply similar techniques to make some sense of what stories and histories lay within. These ‘imagined phylogenies’ could be constructed from any database of images, and of course with a larger database the relations would be more clear. Given a large enough database, we could see fairly seamless trees constructed in which the offspring very strongly resemble each of their parents. It may also be possible to apply these techniques to historical databases of images, perhaps providing some useful information about image relationships.

We will be posting the ‘live’ version of this tool very soon. In the meantime, you can see more images in our Glocal Visualizations Flickr set, along with other visualizations that have been produced as part of the Glocal project so far. As always, questions and feedback are welcome and appreciated!

At last night’s artist talk at the Surrey Art Gallery, I presented a general overview of software-based art, and looked in detail at some of the projects that I have created over the last few years. Here is a reference list for those of you who attended and would like to follow-up:

Generative Art
The Algorists
Jean-Pierre Hebert
Roman Verostko
Manfred Mohr

Processing
OpenFrameworks

Joshua Davis
Jared Tarbell
Alison Mealey
Alex Dragulescu
Jonathan Harris

tree.growth
smart.rockets
The Colour Economy

Thanks to everyone that attended!

Photo Challenge #7: Not Quite Right

Ends: Friday, November 14th, 2008

Brief: Using any photographic technique, create an image that is somehow ‘not quite right’.

Instructions: Tag your photo with “glocalproject” and “photochallenge7″ and add it to our flickr pool. Need help? Email us.

With halowe’en fast approaching, we thought we’d take the opportunity to launch a slightly off-kilter photo challenge. This week, we’d like you to go out and shoot images that are unsettling – images that some one reason or another seem disquieting or not-quite-right.

Of course, we realize this request could lead us into some tricky territory, so let’s remember to stick to the usual guidelines: no violence or depictions of violence, and no obviously offensive content.

There are any number of ways to achieve an unsettling effect with photography. Sometimes, the distressing effect can be the result of combining two unlikely things, such as in this photograph by Diane Arbus, depicting a young boy playing with a toy hand-grenade:

Diane Arbus, Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City (1962)

Another common approach is to make changes to familiar objects, forcing us to question what we normally take for granted. American artist Gordon Matta-Clark was famous for physically disrupting architecture. His ‘building cuts’ consist of a series of works in abandoned buildings in which he removed sections, or cut away parts to create systems which have lost their expected integrity. The results are, in the truest sense of the term, unsettled:

Gorgon Matta Clark, Splitting (1974)

Similarly, Chicago artist Jeanne Dunning’s photographs of the human body ask us to question our ideals and phobias surrounding the human form:

Jeanne Dunning, The Blob 4 (1994)

Dunning’s photographs start to tread into the territory of the surreal. Surrealist imagery can be confusing and startling, and often describes dreamlike fantasies. In Arthur Tress’s staged surrealist photographs, children’s dreams were carefully reconstructed – the results are eery:

Arthur Tress, Boys Flying Dream(L) and Flood Dream (R)

Perhaps the most famously disturbing images in photography come from Ralph Eugene Meatyard. His haunting images, often populated by masked figures, dead birds, and dolls, are deliberately ambiguous. Meatyard was a great reader of philosophy, and his photographs are intended to provoke questioning and contemplation.

As we have seen, there are many techniques and approaches that can be used to create unsettling imagery. We encourage you to experiment with these and other possibilities as you participate in our latest challenge. As always, we invite you to join the discussion in our Flickr pool, where you can exchange ideas and advice with other Glocal participants. Good luck!

This October 18th is your chance to finally see the fruits of your labour! The Surrey Art Gallery Techlab is hosting an afternoon open-house from 1-5pm to show you some of the achievements of the Glocal Project!!

As you know, the Glocal artist team has been busy in the TechLab hacking, coding and building systems to manipulate how we make, view, and think about digital photography. Now, their interactive exhibit invites visitors to experience thousands of photographs made locally, and globally, on a giant touchable screen! The interactive prototype uses a specially-designed camera vision to sense the movement of your hands across the table, revealing photographs connected by human and machine perspectives.

This afternoon event will also invite you into the TechLab to experiment with custom built digital cameras – like a remote controlled toy car that takes photos!

We spent an afternoon earlier this week building up our database so that we can more easily explore the tagspace and understand how people are describing their images. Once that was done, we were able to create some visualizations in Processing which would help us look at this huge amount of data in more interesting ways:

Here you can see that the most popular tag in our pool is ‘glocalproject’. The size of the tags then descend with their popularity. If you look at the largest size of the first image (4000px x 2000px!) you can read a lot of the tags.

For the record, the longest tag in our pool is ‘hesquitecontainedandlikestoprancearoundwithmeatcollege’, which, not surprisingly, only appears once.

Stay tuned for more!