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…

Two ladies from a neighboring sponsor booth were quite keen to try out Glocal’s software applications.  Our applications were so enchanting, we lured many people working at other booths to see what Glocal was up to.  Every one we talked with was very impressed that our software applications were free for download.

One of those participants happened to be one of our immediate neighbors as she worked at the Chase booth next door.  You can see her co-workers in the background.  Just about every nearby participant decided to take their lunch break at our booth. 

Here is our volunteer Byron Peters launching our special Balloon Cam camera-kit. The Balloon Cam is made of 60 balloons and is lifting up a tiny digital video camera.  Byron has this special configuration on a leash so it cannot go far.  This Balloon Cam floated all across Holland Park and truly showed the demographic diversity of the Festival’s audience…from above!

Our summer student Erica Lapadat-Janzen (wearing the pink blouse) explains the Glocal project to some booth attendees while Byron Peters sets up his Balloon Cam for a re-launch.

 The re-launched Balloon Cam floats alongside the sky-train  bridge from Surrey Central to King George Station.

 Here, a family is enjoying learning more about the Glocal project and playing with our Motion Sequence Application on the main presentation monitor.  Yes, that little girl has her eyes closed but that was because she blinked.  It had nothing to do with our application (honest!).

Ready! Aim! Fire!  The boy in this family of booth participants treats our applications as if it were some sort of video game. This might be due to the success of our applications being as fun and engaging as any commercial entertainment system.  If it was not for the reflective glare off the screen, we would show you what we mean.

We would have had 10 times the amount of expected booth traffic if it was not for the fact that our booth was behind this fire-track for most of Saturday afternoon…sigh!  Audience members made diagonal bee-lines between main stages without seeing our booth along the way… double sigh!  Having said that, just about everyone who managed to find out hidden booth, was very enthusiastic about the project and took home our promotional handbill.

This particular festival had the largest Police presence per-capita that we had ever seen!  As you can see from the above picture, the Police had their own mobile prison-sized paddywagon (the one next to the white van)! We would have also taken a photo of the Police crew themselves since they had their own massive BBQ to the left of this wagon (behind our monitor) but we were too afraid to point anything at them…even a harmless camera!

This is what happens to a casual viewer after they have played with our Software Applications…heheheh!  Just kidding.  At least our Applications do not stunt your growth after prolonged usage.  There were many stilt-walkers going for a casual stroll throughout Holland Park for this ceremonious occasion.

You might need to zoom in to see the details of this photo but there were quite a few people doing historical re-enactments that were depicting classic Surrey events. We were quite amazed how interactive their monologues were and they seemed to remain immersed in their role-playing act for quite some time…now, imagine the interactive possibilities if  Glocal also wore period-era attire!  

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).

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.

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.