GLOCAL at Canada Day in Ottawa!

Writing by Jeremy on Wednesday, 16 of July , 2008 at 2:29 pm

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).

About 200+ photos were taken of our presentation and hundreds more screenshots were captured directly off our Multiple Exposure and Motion Sequencing applications (please see the downloads section to the right of this blog).  

Please click on this link here to view these screenshots from both Ottawa’s and Surrey’s Canada Day celebrations that have been stored on our official Flickr photo-sharing pool!

If you were at our presentation during Canada Day and recognize one of your images, please contact us at info@glocal.ca and we will ensure that you get sufficient credit for your contribution(s).

Here is a picture of the blogger (the Coordinator) showing some booth participants the GLOCAL software application…

Photo by Deborah Putman.

Well, enough about us!  Here are some pictures showing you what the event looked like…

One young participant aims the webcam like a gun towards the red painted Canadian leaf on his cheek for inspiration… All of our software applications allow the participant to take any webcam video feed and make still images out of them.  

These 2 seem to be focusing intently on the results that they are creating in realtime…

This picture provides you with a better angle of what they are looking at in realtime.

These girls are carefully calculating all the possible poses they can do in front of the webcam for the GLOCAL application…

When these kids gave me permission to take their photo, I did not realize they would actually be posing for my camera…I was hoping for an action shot of them using the app..sigh!

Here is one little kid almost poking her eye out with the webcam as her brother inspects the results.

Here was what the main presentation monitor looked like… Please scroll down to see the monitor getting transported via a golf caddy!

In addition to my (Jeremy Turner’s) presentation at this Canada Day info booth, we also had the ceramicist Murray Sanders as well as the painter Deborah Putman representing Surrey’s Cultural Capitals of Canada designation.

MURRAY SANDERS - 

Here is a close up of Murray giving a ceramics demo… I am not sure why this photo is turned on its side.  It looked perfectly straight and upright when I uploaded this from the photo-folder…sigh!

Photo by Stephanie Farrington.

In this picture, Murray is giving a special presentation to a group who appear to be members of “Equipe Candu“. A couple of Deborah’s painted portraits are seen in the background.

This photo provides more evidence to suggest that Murray was (physically) the hardest working booth-member in the tent…He was the one who truly broke out into a sweat!

DEBORAH PUTMAN - 

Here is an action shot of Deborah captivating her audience by pointing to one of her painted portraits…. She is showing this particular portrait as inspiration for the audience members to create their own self-portraits as a tree.  This might be a deep philosophical question but what kind of Tree would a GLOCAL artist be?  Certainly the forest as a whole would be ecologically diverse…Hmmm….

Here is a better angle that shows you the audience members in more detail.  You can see the girls at Deborah’s booth table hard at work with imagining what kind of tree they would be.  You can also see Murray working in the background.

Once each participant has drawn themselves as a tree, their self-portrait is hung on a string like precious laundry.  Here you can see one of the tree self-portraits in plain view.

ASSORTED CROWD SHOTS - 

Here was our booth’s official sign.  You can tell the sign is officially Canadian because it is bilingual.  As we are from British Columbia, we are not used to seeing anything other than the written English language except on things like government documents and cereal boxes.  This sign was for all 3 of us since we were Surrey’s cultural ambassadors for 2008.  There was some text that was “lost in translation” however.  GLOCAL became known as “Global” but at least they correctly identified us as a Digital Media project…phew!  On another note, our booths were next to Nanaimo (on Vancouver Island), Sackville (New Brunswick) and a small town in Manitoba called Morden.  After we had finished the event, we had received many compliments that our booth was the most interactive and popular…double phew!

This photo was taken near the beginning of our presentation.  Here were some of our earliest enthusiasts. For most of the day, our dominant demographic was comprised of Senior Citizens and young families. The ladies in red were our volunteers… Although they were our placeholders for an audience in the very beginning of the day, within about 15 minutes, we started to get lengthy line-ups.  At that point, the volunteers helped out with French translation and other diplomatic duties.  

In retrospect, the reason why our booth attendance was skimpy to begin with was due to the fact that our booth was directly behind this massive mud puddle that resembled a giant trench from WWI. Fortunately after many grant applications (heh heh, just kidding – so Canadian, eh?), we managed to get this puddle filled up with some farm-fresh straw.  Now that we were on secure ground, the audience visited our booth in droves.  The line-up for GLOCAL in particular began to grow exponentially once our main presentation monitor had finally arrived…

At last!  GLOCAL’s main presentation monitor had arrived!  We definitely received special treatment for our delivery.  Our Coordinator Julie Billows (the blonde one) managed to score a golf-caddy (or a reasonable facsimile) and had the monitor hand-delivered by one of their more able-bodied employees.

Not to be outdone by the heavy lifting of her colleague, Julie personally delivers the rest of the presentation gear directly to the GLOCAL booth.

Julie was so impressed with how the GLOCAL Motion Sequence application looked on the main presentation screen, she invited over her own boss (which might be the boss of all possible bosses?) to try out the application for himself.  We were pleased to acquire direct photo-evidence clearly displaying the fact that some of the higher echelon from Canadian Heritage were directly experiencing the GLOCAL project.  

Here is a crowd shot that was to the “stage-left” of our booth (I cannot remember which direction we were facing).  On this Main Stage, celebrities such as Murray McLauchlan sang in the evening.  This photo also has a nice view of the National Gallery.

Here is a view of our booth as seen from the perspective of an approaching audience participant.  The lady in red next to the GLOCAL screens was GLOCAL’s personal volunteer.   She doubled up as our security guard when I was off taking photos of the event.  This volunteer also took care of the French translation for questions regarding the GLOCAL project.

We would like to thank everyone at Canadian Heritage for inviting us and would also like to extent our thanks to Julie Billows (Canadian Heritage, Ottawa) and Dan Nielsen (Cultural Capitals of Canada, Surrey) for inviting us to this event and ensuring that we had proper accommodations at the Lord Elgin Hotel.

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Category: Exhibition, Toolkits, Uncategorized

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