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!