Can you explain how you devised the project ‘Inside Looking Out’?

DH: From the outset of this project I consciously decided I was going to venture into the city in hopes of finding uncommon perspectives reflecting how we live in urban metropolises. I realised early on everybody that enters the city, tends to find themselves on the high street window shopping – gazing longingly into shop windows and at manikins.
So I thought what if it I could reverse the familiar gaze of looking into shop windows from the other side. I wanted to reverse this viewing process and make the store window, manikins, promenade, and passer-bys the focus of my image sequence.

How have the images been framed? What compositional rules did you chose?

DH: These photographs are quite strange and abstract but I liked this quality about them – new perspectives should not be too clear or figurative. The photographs almost seem to capture the sight line or perspective of the manikins. In the Glocal project, I liked the idea I could also play with the concepts of stillness and unusual view points.

Again its odd and unsettling to capture the manikins’ sight lines as they peer out onto the world know will not know or realise….I realise I am personifying these figures but I find it interesting since their gaze is a point of position the viewer will never occupy.

How do you view capturing different views on looking on the outside-inside?

DH: I was surprised in some of the more abstract photographs the buildings across the street became reflected and part of the window displays. By allowing things outside the photographic frame to enter it, new perspectives entered the scene that I had not anticipated.


....again I feel a little bit like French photographers Eugene Atget or Doisneau a purveyor capturing the changing city from both the in and outside.

Image left: Eugene Atget: Avenue des Gobelins (before 1926)
George Eastman House Collection; below: Sidelong glance
Robert Doisneau, 1948 © Estate of Robert Doisneau

Artist interview with Peter Marley

Q: Can you explain more about the Iris-in and Iris-out effects you have adopted in your work?

A: In a world where the influence of pop-culture cinema and the subsequent filmic techniques are having a greater effect on how we, as artists, see the world it can be interesting to satirize their ingrained forms and structures. By applying the ‘Iris-in’ and ‘Iris-out’ filmic techniques of framing onto mundane scenarios the significance and composition is placed askew. In motion pictures there is a stigma associated with a harsh vignette that a critical action or crucial reveal is about to take place.

Q: Can you explain more about this phenomenon in popular culture and film?

A: A popular example of this would be the character entrances in FW Marnau’s Nosferatu (1922) or the pivotal scenes in Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920). By placing a harsh vignette (using a toilet roll tube slotted into a 50mm lens) around a solitary object the viewer is challenged to look again at the object and reevaluate the entire image.

Q: How do you consider your work produced for the Glocal project?

A: I am fascinated by the question and process of, “What is being excluded in the frame? The goal of this alternate method of taking photos was to playfully twist cinematic methods and as a result challenge the viewer to reassess common scenes and scenarios when they appear with intensified focus.

Can you reflect how working on the Glocal project changed your photo practice?

Artist response: Twy Miller, May 2008

In creating the series Cat’s Eye View – it is critical to remember images never tell the truth. Despite the camera’s ability, be it film or digital, to capture more than minds can record, it is still only from the perspective of the camera, or the individual wielding the camera. Images carry the intellectual and cultural load of the photographer, whose responsibility is to step outside of boundaries and prejudices, to seek out those things of difference that convey to the viewer not only one’s personal perspective, but throw new seeds of inquiry onto fresh palates.

Differing perspectives requires a shift in thought; a useful tool in most disciplines where it is necessary to take another’s paws and appreciate a new intellectual process. In this instance a house cat is followed for a day and a night (vis a vis a hand controlled radio car and sometimes myself on my hands and knee.)

The angle from which the cat views the world is shown to be markedly different from our human view. Areas which are normally off limits to large limbed bodies become no more than roadways and tunnels, vantage points are examined from which the outside territory is kept under scrutiny, and there is the supremely important moment of mealtime. As cats do not experience colour vision, this sequence was photographed in black and white; adding another level of interpretation.

Choosing a new perspective leads to new initiatives, which in turn informs the photographer of further paths to walk and tunnels to scrutinize. While we have the choice of black and white or colour, we also have the path of what do we depict and how. Glocal has changed my mind’s eye.

Artist Response: Peter Stephenson, May 2008
Northern Ireland

In creating this series of photographs, my aim was to challenge perspective and notions of movement. The premise for this series of images was to depicting a walk along the beach. To record these images from an alternate perspective, my mobile phone was taped to the my ankle and images were recorded as I walked along a beach at Hazelbank Park towards the sea.

For me this was purely experimental photography, which took inspiration from Maya Deren’s alternate perspectives in ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ (1943). This project is open to future development and using more advance mobile telephone equipment would allow for a better quality of images.

60 balloon cam over Playland from M. Simon Levin on Vimeo.

In this video, Glocal agent Byron Peters continues testing his 60 helium balloon camera rig with an arial flight over Playland, in Vancouver. 

We’ve been hard at work here in the Techlab on the newest Glocal Toolkit. This one is fairly simple – it allows users with a webcam to create multiple-exposure compositions quickly and easily. Like all of our toolkits, the final release will include instructions, educator resources, and the complete source code for all of you code-heads out there. The app should be released shortly – until then, here are a couple of test images from the app, created here at the Gallery:

Our tiny little GLOCAL sign has now evolved to the size of a billboard (the little sign is still in the park) and has now been formally placed on top of the retail facade looking over the plaza of Canada in SL. In about a week, this will evolve further into a video-billboard but for now, it just has our newest logo. The billboard was not placed where we had originally intended but is good enough for our promotional and marketing purposes.

Hey there GLOCAL blog-readers!

We have some more progress to report on GLOCAL’s presence in the popular virtual world known as Second Life:

1) We have received some price quotes on having the Surrey Techlab in SL. This includes both the architectural estimate and the land rental costs.

2) We have a billboard now in Canada in SL. In a few days, we should have our flash animation promo video embedded into the billboard for all to see.

3) The Surrey Art Gallery’s Curator and Coordinator have been speculating some other islands such as the possibility of setting roots on the popular artists’ community known as Odyssey Island (curated by Sugar Seville) as a place to host the entire Surrey Art Gallery.

(Read more…)

GLOCAL’s 60 Balloon Cam at Trout Lake, Vancouver from GLOCAL on Vimeo.

This video shows a 60-balloon cam created by the GLOCAL participant, Byron Peters.

This was launched from Trout Lake in Vancouver.

I had just finished writing my post about Glocal, Flickr, and Creative Commons when a segment came onto CBC Radio about… Creative Commons! It’s a piece of an episode of Spark, CBC’s weekly show about technology and culture. You can listen to the whole episode online or subscribe to the podcast here.

It’s interesting to see the sheer amount of property that is licensed by CC. On Flickr alone, there are more than 60 million photos with some or no rights reserved. You can use the Creative Commons Search Engine to look for content to use in your own projects.