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 .

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!

This screenshot from Glocal’s Motion Sequence Application (MSA) is an anonymous portrait of a tree in Holland Park – one of the many trees that were being showcased at Surrey’s Fusion Festival!

 Hello Glocal Blog Readers!

This Summer season has become an extremely prolific one for the info-crew at Glocal… 

In addition to the Canada Day festivities, the Glocal project was also represented by the Fusion Festival in Surrey (July 19-20, 2008), another Cultural Capitals of Canada initiative.

Computers in the tent were used to allow visitors to get creative with a web-cam. An additional computer provided access to the glocal website and blog so that visitors could see first hand how to download the software applications and contribute to the project.

Here are some more pictures from this culturally diverse summer blockbuster event…

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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).

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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.

Using some of our newest custom software tools, we have come up with a site-specific presentation for the Vancouver Art Gallery. The Tech test went well on Tuesday. Now we shall see how it works out with our (4 ) 5000 lumen projectors provided by Christopher Moreno of 365 productions. Here’s what we said we are going to do:

At FUSE the VAG’s architecture is uniquely transformed through new media technologies, projecting FUSE-goers as celestial bodies, monumental frescoes and floating avatars — their improvised actions triggering a series of unexpected graphic narratives that continuously animate the crowned cupola of the central rotunda.

In addition for two 15 minute sessions Glocal will be projecting onto the Sears building’s white facade.

Its an all-nighter so we are conditioning our sleep patterns to get ready.

While flying to Victoria to meet for some consultation, we had the great opportunity to test the Motion Sequence Application in capturing some dizzying perspectives.

Its got us considering different ways we can create views from above. We’ve already started work on the Balloon Cams and we will soon be posting some tool kits that pass on tips on how to make your own.

Kite cams are next. Our initial research shows that many people are already doing this in cool and interesting ways. Check out both a modified disposable kite cam made by David Hunt and some little more sophisticated cradles that are used by kite cam photographers. Also the folks at Engadget have done a great job of explaining the hack of an old  digital cam to make a digital kite cam.