Glocal Project: Interactive Table Prototype from Glocal Project on Vimeo.

New versions of the Glocal Motion Sequence App, Multiple Exposure App and Long Exposure App have been released.  These updates fix a few issues when running the apps on Macs.  New features include an improved interface for loading and working with video files, as well as a built-in image browser for reviewing your images from within the application.

The new image broswer feature - with an image by artist and educator Greg Dawe

The Glocal Project is a massive contributive artwork. Two months before the launch of the project, we already have upwards of 8,000 submissions from more than 2,000 participants around the world.

One of the most challenging questions has been: how can we make sense of such a large collection of images?

Obviously the first place to start is to catalogue as much information as we can about each image. Some of this information is easy to gather: place, date, place, tags, and other basic information is readily available through Flickr. We’ve also written some simple scripts to record luminosity and to put together a colour pallette for each image. Perhaps most interestingly, we’ve also integrated compositional analysis software, which looks at each image and assigns it a ’signature’. This signature can then be compared against others in the database to find similar images. This is a very useful tool, since it allows us to find relationships between images that may not have been obvious to human analysis.

I began thinking about these image signatures as a kind of genotype – genetic information that describes each unique image. With that in mind, I wondered wether it would be possible to breed images! The process starts off simply – the image signatures are spliced together at two insertion points:

Sig 1: 1111|111111111111|111111

Sig 2: 2222|222222222222|222222

Child: 1111|222222222222|111111

We then take the child signature and run it through the similarity engine, looking for images in the Glocal pool that matched the child most closely. Happily, this process worked. Below, you can see the three images that result from ‘breeding’ the initial two images. In the offspring, we see the circular element from the parent image on the left in all three images. The most successful child here is the middle one, where we see both the light circular shape from the ‘egg’ and the colour abstraction from the image on the right.

This process can be repeated over generations. In the next image below, I’ve selected the two outside images and asked for images that could be their offspring. In almost all of the child images, we see the consistent circular image in the middle of the frame. There are a few outliers, which may have been imperfect matches – or, more interestingly, which may have picked up on ‘dormant’ portions of the image genotype from previous generations.

We can proceed through these ‘trees’ in a generational fashion, or we can diverge and back-breed. If you take a close look at the image at the top of this post (click to get a larger view), you will see that there is a fair amount of inter-generational mixing.

As this process continues, we can explore the relational landscape that exists in the Glocal pool, and in the process we construct ‘family trees’ which present a possible way in which the images could be related. I imagine an anthropologist, stumbling onto a box containing 8,000 images, might apply similar techniques to make some sense of what stories and histories lay within. These ‘imagined phylogenies’ could be constructed from any database of images, and of course with a larger database the relations would be more clear. Given a large enough database, we could see fairly seamless trees constructed in which the offspring very strongly resemble each of their parents. It may also be possible to apply these techniques to historical databases of images, perhaps providing some useful information about image relationships.

We will be posting the ‘live’ version of this tool very soon. In the meantime, you can see more images in our Glocal Visualizations Flickr set, along with other visualizations that have been produced as part of the Glocal project so far. As always, questions and feedback are welcome and appreciated!

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!

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!

Photo Challenge #6: Near | Far — Photo Diptych

Ends: Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Brief: Create a pairing of two images. The images together should suggest the theme of "Near | Far". It could be that the diptych reflects literally that which is in close proximity and then a more distant version of the same scene. We are, as always, also looking for some interpretation of these instructions!

Instructions: Tag your photo with “glocalproject” and “photochallenge6″ and add it to our flickr pool. Need help? Email us.

Most of us, as photographers, have experimented with both macro (close-up) and long-distance perspectives. Brought together, these different points-of-view reveal a sense of movement and a shift in perspective that suggests a cinematic (film-like) view. Traditionally, scenes in documentaries and feature films have been revealed through the re-sequenceing of several angles: an established or ‘master’ shot, a mid- range shot and a close up. In this photo challenge, we’d like you to use these shifts in focal distance to create a sense of tension between two images.

Eve Sonneman: Cannon Balls By the Dozen

Eve Sonneman: The Docking of Marietta Cannes

Contemporary photographers like Eve Sonneman have been working with diptychs for years. Sometimes the pairing suggests a drastic change in perspective. Other times, like in time the diptych below, the shift between near & far becomes more subtle.

Eve Sonneman: Coney Island Couple

Of course the structural pairing of two images or panels has been going on for a long time. Diptychs played a significant role in early religious iconography – take for example this 17th century Deesis where the combination of two images helps the narrative of a sacred moment in history. These early diptychs were hinged, and often depicted living figures on one side and the departed on the other. When contemporary artists choose to work in this way they are often referencing these early artifacts – think of how Andy Warhol plays with another "sacred icon" in this Near | Far pairing.

In Marilyn Diptych, 1962, Warhol was in some ways playing with this religious connotation, but also bringing together his fascination with death and celebrity status. We perceive the left side advancing towards us because of its vibrant colours and the right recedes due to its muted greys. This explores the fading memory of this star and perhaps the artist himself.

As well as side-by-side, diptychs can also be presented on top of each other like this Andreas Gursky photograph of the aisles of a supermarket that has just been noted for being the highest sellling photograph ever. Feel free to experiment with different ways to present your diptych.

Andreas Gursky: 99 Cent II, Diptych

We’re look forward to seeing what you all come up with. The challenge is on!

They’re back – better, faster, stronger. Brand New versions of all our glocal apps are now up on the site and available for download. The apps have been completely rewritten and performance is greatly improved. Key changes in these versions include much improved useability and performance in Windows, and the ability to use pre-recorded / imported video. The new glocal toolkits have been written in Open Frameworks, a  C++ based software platform for creative coding and art experimentation.

Download: Motion Sequence App v2.  7.2mb

Download: Multiple Exposure App v2  7.2mb

Download: Long Exposure App v2  7.1mb

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From time to time, we’ll be posting some sneak-peaks into some of the things we’re working on in the TechLab, both here and in our Flickr Pool.

One of the things that we are looking at in this project are the myriad relationships between images. Some of these relationships are clear – photos taken by the same artist, images from the same town, or with a shared tag. Other relationships are hidden a bit deeper. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working with software (Processing, Flash, PHP, C++) to make some tools that can help us explore these unseen links. Here are some early sketches from this work – showing some ways the links and pathways within the Glocal Pool can be explored:

flickr.com/photos/blprnt/sets/72157606955337736/

If you look hard enough, you may be able to see your own images in the networks! With 1,200+ images, I had to pick some photos at random to be the ’seed’. Hopefully soon you’ll be able to try this out with your own images. This is a similarity map, with a fairly high tolerance. The ring around the center image is made up of the images that are most similar to the seed. From those images, the offshoots represent more similarity chains. The farther you get from the center, the less similar the images are to the seed:

 Here’s the same map with a lower tolerance:

 This is a colour map, showing images with similar overall colour to the central image:

 And one more: 

You can see the full photoset here.

Photo Challenge #3: Tunnel Vision
Challenge Ends: Tuesday September 2nd

Brief: Shoot an image using a toilet paper roll as a vignetting device.

Instructions: Tag your image with ‘glocalproject’ and ‘photochallenge’, and add it to this our Glocal Flickr Pool. Need help? E-mail us.

In April, we posted an interview with Irish artist Peter Marley. For the Glocal Project, Peter shot a series of unique images using iris-in and iris-out effects. These images were shot using a surprisingly simple peice of photographic technology – a toilet paper roll. This week, we are asking you to create your own toilet-tube enhanced images.

The technique is simple – hold a toilet paper roll (or a paper towel roll) in front of your lens… and shoot! The resulting image will be not quite whole. As Marley explains:

“I am fascinated by the question and process of, ‘What is being excluded in the frame?’ The goal of this alternate method of taking photos was to playfully twist cinematic methods and as a result challenge the viewer to reassess common scenes and scenarios when they appear with intensified focus.”

The results of toilet-tube photography suggest vignetting, an effect that you may be familiar with from both photographic and film history. Originally, this vignetting effect was not intentional – instead, it was a result of limitations of lens optics, incompatible camera parts, or poor projections. American photographer Emmet Gowin used a 4×5 lens on an 8×10 camera to achieve a dramatic vignetting effect:

Vignetting is also a frequent result in photographs taken by toy cameras such as the Holga and the Diana. Similar to Gowin’s images, this vignetting usually results from the negatives being slightly smaller than the camera lens.

Wonderwall, by Flickr user wlwarner, shot with a Holga

Some of our Glocal Pool photographers are already using tube-vignetting. This photo from Eduardo Nasi uses tangible vignetting to excellent effect:

As always, feel free to post your comments and questions here. We’re looking forward to seeing the results!