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.

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.