Photochallenge #8: Found Text and the Urban Life

Ends: Friday, December 12, 2008

Brief: Find words or text that appeal to you anywhere in your environment. Wait for “something interesting” to happen, with pedestrians, with light, with framing, with angles! Anything creative that strikes you.

In photo challenge #7, we asked you to find things that were “not quite right”. We were amazed by the various submissions that we received and began to think of how our project offers this amazing opportunity for street-level exposure to so many urban centres around the world. Photo challenge #8 has further exploration of this topic at it’s objective.

Street photography became possible in the early 20th century when advancements in technology made it possible to carry a hand-held camera on one’s body. There was much excitement in the ability to capture “everyday life” as the common man experienced it. Street photography allows us to consider how what we see everyday impacts what we know about the world. Considering text as a common thread in urban life adds a common thread from which to view many street photographers’ works.

In the photography of Walker Evans, the visuality of urban life reveals important cultural information about his early 20th century work. At the time of his black and white street photography, capitalism was very much changing the appearance of city streets as the ability to mass produce goods brought about consumerist culture. As we readily recognize, urban street signage dots the landscape:

New Orleans Street Corner, 1935

What does this photo tell us about the urban setting in which it was taken? We can extract a lot just through a quick glance: what language is spoken there, what kinds of products are consumed there, what kind of cars are driven there etc. etc.. Objectively, it’s also relevant to look at the scene as a whole and consider how drastic the advertising really is in relation to the entire scene. Only the fruits and vegetables in the shop window remind us of the natural world and the resources that many of our products are created from.

Later, Fred Herzog mostly documented the changing streets of Vancouver, a city on the west coast of Canada, revealing again, the almost-overwhelming presence of street signs and advertisements, as the city moved from “backwater town” to a world-class city with many desirable goods and services for its inhabitants.

The above photo, taken in Vancouver in 1968, brings colour into the visual spectrum of street photography. The viewer is bombarded by brightly coloured neon and back-lit signage, “games, guns, movies,” “western gym,” “washington.”  

Most street photographers at this time were still using black and white, while Herzog preferred to work in Kodachrome, and shot on slide film. Although unnoticed for years, his work is now recognized as an important body of historical photographs.  Today, the colours, font and designs of those streets signs are associated with forgotten signage in dilapidated and run-down neighbourhoods. The fact that his slide films were just recently developed into prints for exhibitions provides an extraordinary opportunity to look at “new” prints that contain outdated cultural information, including fonts and colours that we no longer associate with contemporary  city scenes.

Arcade, 1968

Herzog also created some interesting use of text in his street photography. One word in the photo below hangs in the frame of a very theatrical San-Francisco moment. What is it about the word “only” that continually piques our curiosity each time we look at it? Here, Herzog has selected a moment in time, well aware of the text that lingers in the top of the frame, something we’re hoping our photo challenge participants will consider as they go out looking for inspiration.

Vercruz 96

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…

(Read more…)

The Glocal team will be on site this Friday at the Vancouver Art Gallery for gallery’s all-night FUSE event. We will be transforming the 3rd floor rotunda into an immersive, interactive experience, demonstrating some of the technology that we have been developing at the TechLab. The installation will involve 4 live cameras and 4 architecturally-incorporated projection screens, and will be driven by a custom-written software application written by the Glocal team.

We’ll be running from 10pm until 3am – come by and check it out!

Find out more about FUSE

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.

Still looking at the whack of images we have taken while flying across the Georgia Strait, it has brought to light the use of still images alongside moving images. As you must of guessed in the last blog, Real vs. Representation, the flying plane is taken from a brochure image of the plane we are flying in.

So what other things can be done when you introduce printed still images in front of the webcam.

The introduction of micro-narratives through the juxtaposition of images and live feeds. The printed drawing and the real time pilot suggest prophetic possibilties to the flight journey.

Or what if real time representation was sistered to the schematic? Check out this image of the Island and its map illustration.

This has given us some new ideas for the upcoming Fuse event!

One of the interesting things about the Motion Sequence Application is that it initially suggests that what is being captured is live and therefore real motion in real time. Without getting overly philosophical, what is it that we actually expect when the camera captures something over time? Look at these images taken while flying over Vancouver and the Georgia State.

What is real and what is representation?

Are there planes flying that close to ours? Is the propeller actually being caught and rendered almost still?

We’ve been hard at work here in the Techlab on the newest Glocal Toolkit. This one is fairly simple – it allows users with a webcam to create multiple-exposure compositions quickly and easily. Like all of our toolkits, the final release will include instructions, educator resources, and the complete source code for all of you code-heads out there. The app should be released shortly – until then, here are a couple of test images from the app, created here at the Gallery:

Our tiny little GLOCAL sign has now evolved to the size of a billboard (the little sign is still in the park) and has now been formally placed on top of the retail facade looking over the plaza of Canada in SL. In about a week, this will evolve further into a video-billboard but for now, it just has our newest logo. The billboard was not placed where we had originally intended but is good enough for our promotional and marketing purposes.

Hey there GLOCAL blog-readers!

We have some more progress to report on GLOCAL’s presence in the popular virtual world known as Second Life:

1) We have received some price quotes on having the Surrey Techlab in SL. This includes both the architectural estimate and the land rental costs.

2) We have a billboard now in Canada in SL. In a few days, we should have our flash animation promo video embedded into the billboard for all to see.

3) The Surrey Art Gallery’s Curator and Coordinator have been speculating some other islands such as the possibility of setting roots on the popular artists’ community known as Odyssey Island (curated by Sugar Seville) as a place to host the entire Surrey Art Gallery.

(Read more…)

Self-portrait of Jeremy Owen Turner (Project Coordinator – GLOCAL – Surrey Art Gallery) with the other booth participants from the Surrey Art Gallery. For this photo, the Coordinator used the Glocal prototype interface.

Hello GLOCAL Project blog-readers,

As Coordinator, I have finally taken some time to reflect on my Winterfest information presentation on behalf of the Surrey Art Gallery and the Cultural Capitals of Canada Initiative. This mass-media event took place at Central City (Surrey Central) – more specifically, in the foyer of Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT).

As some of you might know, Surrey has been declared Canada’s official Cultural Capital of 2008 so this was a landmark opportunity to showcase the latest in interactive digital media art and technology.

The GLOCAL presentation was a huge success. Many onlookers from every demographic description felt compelled to play with this interactive screen… Some kids had even begged their parents to return to my booth to explore the video processing application developed by the GLOCAL team and many people wanted to learn more so I managed to hand out most of the official GLOCAL brochures.

I believe the reason why the GLOCAL booth in particular had such a steady stream of activity throughout the day was due primarily to the fact that this interactive screen directly engaged the audience in realtime. The webcam was also mobile enough for each attendee to casually play with the viewing angles and by doing so, a unique video-mosaic was created straight out of their own imagination.

I think that most people who visited the GLOCAL booth felt they were directly interpreting the shifting sights of the Winterfest as if they were one of the performers being featured at the event.

As a result of this booth presentation, I think there will be sufficient interest from schools and individuals from the Surrey community to engage in both short-term and long-term workshops with the artists that comprise the GLOCAL Team.

I will have more photos from this event in a future blog posting but for now, here are some officially released photos:

Here is a portrait of Dan Nielsen (Project Manager – Surrey 2008 – Cultural Capital of Canada) using the GLOCAL prototype interface.

Photo by Rick Chapman. Here is what the official Winterfest sign looked like…

Photo by Rick Chapman. The GLOCAL Coordinator is pictured on the far right in front of his FUSION information booth. He is wearing a white t-shirt and standing not too far away from an over-saturated white TV screen that is suspended from the ceiling. The computer screen used to display GLOCAL’s prototype software application looked really nice in person but the photographer had used a flash so the GLOCAL screen is not very visible in this picture.

Photo by Rick Chapman. Inside that illuminated window was where all our information booths were so you could imagine how powerful and loud the fireworks were since they were practically exploding right next to the building complex’s facade. When the explosions first went off, everyone thought someone had detonated a bomb.

Photo by Rick Chapman.Here is another view of the fireworks display that occurred right next to the entrance to the SIAT building.

Photo by Rick Chapman. Here is one last view of the fireworks for Winterfest which by the way, had the keyword FUSION as its theme for this year….

From left-right: Jeremy Owen Turner (Coordinator), M. Simon Levin (Artist), Jer Thorp (Artist), Sylvia Grace Borda (Artist).
Photo taken by Brian Foreman on January 18, 2008.