The above image is an example of a participants’ response to exploring colour and motion using the Motion Sequence Application (MSA).

Hello Glocal Blog Readers!

Glocal just held a week-long intensive Digital Summer Camp that was hosted by both Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology and the Surrey Art Gallery.

22 Youth from Surrey were selected to take part in this free digital summer camp from July 14-18, 2008. (Read more…)

These images above were created with Glocal Long Exposure application, our newest toolkit, which is now available for public download from our toolkits page.

The Long Exposure Application is designed to mimic traditional long exposure photography. Early photographers did not have the luxury of split second shutter speeds, and the long duration of the exposures created a different kind of photographic aesthetic. This image by Daguerre for example:

This application allows you to set an exposure time ranging from seconds to hours and gives a live preview of the image as it develops over time.

All our toolkits are compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms and require a webcam to run properly.

Hacking your old digital camera just got easier! Last week we received 250 printed circuit boards – built to connect your digital camera to a sound sensor and an intervalometer (see our camera hack post for more details).

You can see a step-by-step GIF animation of the process here: trigger.gif (2.21MB)

We’ve packaged these custom-made Arduino-based boards boards together with the necessary parts so that you can assemble your own hacked digi-cam and take photos from brand new perspectives.

Since the hacked cameras are self-contained, they can be placed in virtually any location and can take shots from almost any angle – hands-free. So far, working with students at our Digital Summer Camp, we’ve prototyped bicycle cams, skateboard cams, hamster-ball cams, spray-paint cams, RC-cams, tree-cams – and more!

Want one? Here’s our first of a series of weekly photo challenges. We’ll pick some of our favourites submisions – they’ll be posted here and the artists will receive a FREE Camera Trigger Kit. Because this is our first photo challenge, we’re giving away 10 FREE KITS!

Instructions:

1) Take a photograph from a unique perspective. From beneath a car, on top of a bridge, underwater, in your sock drawer – we want to see your world from a new angle.

2) Upload the photo to Flickr and tag it with ‘glocalproject’ and ‘photochallenge’.

If your image is selected, we’ll mail you a camera kit right away. We’ll be giving all of our boards away over the next few months – so stay tuned!

Canada Day

This is one of my favourite images from Canada Day. These beautiful Persian girls came into the tent and quite naturally made stunning images.

To view more Canada Day images, check out the new posts on our flickr pool.

Hello there GLOCAL blog readers!

Our info-booth presentation at Ottawa’s Canada Day celebration was a success!

The entire GLOCAL collective was chosen as an “artist” alongside the ceramicist Murray Sanders and the painter Deborah Putman to represent Surrey as the ambassadors on behalf of Surrey’s designation as a Cultural Capital of Canada for 2008.

We were all very grateful that the weather held up for this event as the evening before was pouring with rain and this horrendous weather reduced the grassy lawn of Major’s Hill Park to vast puddles of mud.

There was also some initial panic over the installation of GLOCAL’s main presentation monitor but this issue was also quickly resolved when the day arrived (scroll down for the juicy details).

(Read more…)

At the Vancouver Art Gallery’s recent Fuse event, the Glocal team activated part of the architectural dome atop the central rotunda, bridging the two flanking shows of Zhang Huan and Rebecca Belmore. In this way, we created an interstitial performative space between two great exhibitions. The mid-career surveys reveal the breadth of these world re-known artists. Both artist’s work reflect their concerns with how cultural memory can inscribe place through the body and performance. For both artists, the body is the site for the enactment of social, political and cultural critiques most often against the state. In Zhang Huan’s work the performing body is the place where the cultural act can’t be immediately shut down. Through unsanctioned performances at cultural sites, his embodied art resists the mechanisms of state censorship. Rebecca Belmore’s deeply political work is revealed through sculpture, video and photographic documentation and testifies to how her body is a site of resistance that is in continual struggle with the inscribing colonial and cultural forces of everyday life.

In response to these bodies of work and the greater context of Krazy! The Delirious World of Anime + Comic + Video Games + Art, the Glocal project created a custom app. — the Micro-Narrative Application.

This allows us to compose projected images from the 4 live camera feeds within a generative panel set, (derived from the language of graphic novel pages). (For a more technical description of how this was done check out Glocal team member Jer Thorp’s blog.) Some images were displayed live – others were delayed by up to 30 seconds. Some panels were rendered in greyscale, and some were combined with other feeds to create dynamic multiple exposures. The grid patterns were occasionally very ordered, but often quite abstract. Sometimes unknowingly, the gallery visitors were building their own micro-narratives – temporal stories that played without a beginning or end in the circular dome of the neo-classical style rotunda. With one of the live camera feeds, our glocal team captured images both political and graphic from printed media to butt in and up against those of gallery goers.

Images of Leonard Pelletier -the activist and member of the American Indian Movement – handcuffed and extradited away from the BC Supreme Court ( the former tenant of this architectural space ) juxtaposed with strapless dressed gals attending this all night event. At times racialized images of a black jesus and Khoikhoi or hotentot woman hung momentarily above peoples heads like celestial bodies, these monumental frescoes inverting the narrative of institutional power. Although the all night Fuse Event ( 6 PM — 6 AM ) got shut down around 3 it was not a problem for us. We were able to run this site-specific application for 5 hours creating an interactive performative form that redressed the space with the making of other stories.