Glocal Group - EU call for submissions

PARTICIPATE IN A CANADIAN PHOTO BASED PROJECT

This is a call for submissions

First deadline: July 1, 2008
Theme: Time lapse and Motion capture photography

Your assignment to produce a mini folio of artwork and documentation for inclusion in the Cultural Capital Cities – City of Surrey (Canada) Project

About the project:
Glocal (global + local) is an interactive photo archive created by a team of Capital Cultural Award winning artists: Sylvia Grace Borda, M Simon Levin, and Jer Thorp. The artists will be building a massive international and local photo-based archive to challenge conventional image capture in digital photography.

Ever thought of what pictures a bicycle 'cam' might take?
Wonder how a 'cam' could be used with a remote controlled toy helicopter or a kite?
Have you ever thought about using a hula-hoop 'cam' to capture images?

Completed works curated by the Glocal artists will capture 'alt views' about our world. These works will be displayed from Fall 2008 at the City of Surrey (British Columbia, Canada) with a number of other exhibitions leading up to the "Sites" exhibition as part of the Winter Olympics 2010 hosted in Vancouver, Canada.


Project specifications
Process:
1a) Design and adopt an unusual 'cam' position for capturing a sequence of images
For example. Walking Shoe cam; bike cam, kite cam, skateboard cam, etc.
1b) produce a set of images from this perspective to create a time lapse or motion sequence
1c) save a series of consecutive images from this perspective
→ 10 plus consecutive images are expected for one thematic submission

2a) OPTIONAL: digitally document yourself at work using a time lapse/motion sequence as described above
2b) OPTIONAL: write a brief about how you set-up a camera to capture a time lapse/motion sequence, what worked in the photo shoot, and what failed.


THE PROCESS OF ONLINE SUBMISSION
Submitting your digital photographs
We'll be curating images from Flickr for the Glocal project, so uploading your images to the Flickr site is an easy way to get involved.

Flickr is an online photo archive with upwards of 2 billion archived photos. While most of the images are uploaded by the general public, Flickr has also been active in archiving institutional photography collections, like those from the Library of Congress.

The image gallery that you see above this post is a live feed from the Flickr Glocal pool - it shows you all of the images that have been contributed to the project so far. As things start to pick-up steam over the next little while, you’ll see lots of updates - so check back often for new images.

Remember to add your images to the Glocal photo pool
and
here’s how:

1) Log-in to your Flickr account and upload photos as usual. If you don’t have a Flickr account, you sign up for one from the Flickr main page. We recommend using the Flickr Uploadr for uploading images, which lets you sort and tag photos offline and upload them in one big batch when you are ready.

2) First of, tag all your Glocal images with the tag ‘glocalproject‘. This will make sure your images can be found by the Glocal team.

3) Next, you'll want to change the license for your image. By default, any image that you upload to Flickr is copyrighted - no one can legally use the image in any way.

Your image is 'all rights reserved'. However, if you want artists, creators, institutions - anyone to use your image, you can change your image to 'some rights reserved' or 'no rights reserved'.

Flickr enables this by allowing you to attach a Creative Commons License to your image. To do this, look to the right of your image where you see the copyright (©) symbol. Click on the ‘edit’ button, and select one of the Creative Commons Licenses for your image. Any of these licenses will allow the Glocal Project to use your image - for more information about the choice of licenses, visit the Creative Commons website and see our submission intent below.

4) Finally, you can add your image to the Glocal Group’s photo pool archive. To do this, click on the ’send to groups’ icon from above the photo and select the Glocal group. Of course, you’ll need to belong to the Glocal group first - you can do that from the Glocal Flickr Group homepage.


Other bits and bytes: once you've registered with Flickr and you've authorised the site to access your selected photos you will be able to:

• Build your Glocal project portfolio and upload photos to the projects
• Receive feedback on your work
• Be part of an emerging photo-archive and leading edge photo archive and Canadian curatorial showcase about digital media
  

When you give the Glocal Project permission to access your Flickr photos:

• We will only use the Flickr photos you select to be submitted to the Glocal Flickr Project group
• The Glocal project curatorial team will only review your 'Glocalproject' tagged photos in your Flickr account
• Image use:
  By allowing for your submitted images to be posted as part of the Glocal Flickr group, we can showcase the images on the web to create a new curatorial exhibition based on the theme of Time lapse and Motion sequences. We may also publish the submitted images for profiling on other promotional websites and channels to promote the Glocal project.

  The most important thing to understand is that we won't own your work and you retain your rights to it.

Need more info email: glocalprojectEU@googlemail.com

Example project work 1

What Do I look like….when I’d really rather be sleeping?

Project work by Irish artist, David Timlin

[Click on the work to see David's sequential portraits from midnight to 9am]

In responding to the Glocal project, David elected to employ time lapse photography. While time lapse photography is traditionally used to track and monitor environmental changes, David decided to use himself as the subject in this work.

In What Do I look like….when I’d really rather be sleeping? - the title alludes to the events that have been documented. In this artwork David mounted his camera off his bedpost and then set his alarm clock throughout the night to wake him hour on the hour. The documents reveal the juxtaposition of the subject being barely awake and responsive to the camera. Much like Vito Acconci’s works of the 1970s where his performances reflected on the representation and the act of being psychologically observed, David extends these concepts to how the body can become a material object, gazed and out of context in both time and place.

Example project 2: Low angle perspective, cheap optics and mobile telephone time lapse

A key objective of the Glocal curatorial project involves changing how users work and respond to digital technologies.

In a world where digital recording devices dominate, shooting at eye level seems to be the most natural. What if this was altered? How would these other alternative views appear?

In this project we look at changing perspectives (ie. by literally placing cameras and recorders at unusual heights or anchored positions) and how can we capture the everyday in unordinary ways.

Artist, Sarah Gale, assisting in the delivery of the Glocal project was interested in addressing ‘HOW’ to shift image relationships and with the support plus suggestions from the public came up with this new concept.

Sarah experimented what would happen when the digital camera was placed off tripod and away from the rational eye. Below are the first observational works of a cat eating



Pictures were devised by placing a camera on a timer under a plastic food tray. The results - meal time like no one has ever envisioned!

Artist interview: Tina Moore

An artist interview about Tina Moore's participation in the Glocal Project

In order to capture alternative views of the world I avoided photographing from eye level. Instead, I attached my camera to my ankle when shooting in Portmore Cemetery and placed my camera in a clear handbag when photographing in Antrim Castle Gardens, by attaching the camera to my ankle at Portmore, also known as Laloo, I captured images that are rich with texture, grass often in the foreground, a mid layer of rocks or gravestone and a higher level of trees and sky. An eerie self-portrait, in which the camera cannot be seen, was captured in the reflection on a gravestone.


At Antrim Castle Gardens, the camera was placed from a higher viewpoint, in a bag that was placed over my shoulder. As I walked, the camera was able to move around capturing the remains of Antrim Castle, the woods, historical monuments and gardens. The effect created by the plastic in front of the lens enhances the composition and adds texture to the image plain. The odd look of the images takes on the appearance of older photographs, and I think is quite fitting for such a place with rich histories.

NB - each sequence consists of over 20 time lapsed photos

Artist interviews: Twy Miller and Peter Stephenson

Can you reflect how working on the Glocal project changed your photo practice?

Artist response: Twy Miller, May 2008

In creating the series Cat’s Eye View - it is critical to remember images never tell the truth. Despite the camera’s ability, be it film or digital, to capture more than minds can record, it is still only from the perspective of the camera, or the individual wielding the camera. Images carry the intellectual and cultural load of the photographer, whose responsibility is to step outside of boundaries and prejudices, to seek out those things of difference that convey to the viewer not only one’s personal perspective, but throw new seeds of inquiry onto fresh palates.

Differing perspectives requires a shift in thought; a useful tool in most disciplines where it is necessary to take another’s paws and appreciate a new intellectual process. In this instance a house cat is followed for a day and a night (vis a vis a hand controlled radio car and sometimes myself on my hands and knee.)

The angle from which the cat views the world is shown to be markedly different from our human view. Areas which are normally off limits to large limbed bodies become no more than roadways and tunnels, vantage points are examined from which the outside territory is kept under scrutiny, and there is the supremely important moment of mealtime. As cats do not experience colour vision, this sequence was photographed in black and white; adding another level of interpretation.

Choosing a new perspective leads to new initiatives, which in turn informs the photographer of further paths to walk and tunnels to scrutinize. While we have the choice of black and white or colour, we also have the path of what do we depict and how. Glocal has changed my mind's eye.


Artist Response: Peter Stephenson, May 2008
Northern Ireland

In creating this series of photographs, my aim was to challenge perspective and notions of movement. The premise for this series of images was to depicting a walk along the beach. To record these images from an alternate perspective, my mobile phone was taped to the my ankle and images were recorded as I walked along a beach at Hazelbank Park towards the sea.

For me this was purely experimental photography, which took inspiration from Maya Deren’s alternate perspectives in ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ (1943). This project is open to future development and using more advance mobile telephone equipment would allow for a better quality of images.

New media toolkit: Multiple image creation software

The Glocal motion application software kit is open-sourced coded and free to download. The application streams video in real time, but in a way you may not anticipate. Multiple events and narratives can be captured. The main subject is repeated in this application over a 100 frames.

Click on the link below for the Glocal motion application kit. It has directions for how to work the software on various operating platforms.

<http://www.glocal.ca/downloads/MotionSequenceApplication.zip>

The image below was generated from a computer using the Glocal motion sequences application. Feel free to use the application to create new motion sequence based narratives with your computer's own in built camera.

Of interest, the top left frame shows live events, while the adjacent windows show events that have already passed in time. Since each scene can be looked at individually and/or collectively, the Glocal artists have produced an application in which the viewer can examine the subtle differences that appear between gesture, motion, and time.

The Glocal Motion Sequence Application is closely related to time-lapse photography
Time lapse is a moving image technique whereby each film frame is captured at a rate much slower than it will be played back. When replayed at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapsing.

Processes that would normally appear subtle to the human eye, such as a bird in flight, become very pronounced. A professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harold “Doc” Edgerton (1903-1990), carried forward early time lapse experiments with his development of the electronic stroboscope. Through his investigations using 'strobes' and time lapse imagery, Edgerton set into motion a lifelong course of innovation centered on the idea of 'making the invisible visible'.

Edgerton's work also brought together both artistic expression and scientific principles in a way that few had done before. In the same way, the Glocal Motion Sequence Application can help us see things using new perspectives.

Workshops

A limited number of artist led Glocal image workshops are available on request for community based cultural organisations. Please enquire at glocalprojectEU@googlemail.com

Other opportunities also listed at  www.berlinerpool.de/mondaynews/

More example work

Artist interview with Peter Marley
Iris-in and Iris-out effects

In a world where the influence of pop-culture cinema and the subsequent filmic techniques are having a greater effect on how we, as artists, see the world it can be interesting to satirize their ingrained forms and structures. By applying the ‘Iris-in’ and ‘Iris-out’ filmic techniques of framing onto mundane scenarios the significance and composition is placed askew. In motion pictures there is a stigma associated with a harsh vignette that a critical action or crucial reveal is about to take place.

A popular example of this would be the character entrances in FW Marnau’s Nosferatu (1922) or the pivotal scenes in Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920). By placing a harsh vignette (using a toilet roll tube slotted into a 50mm lens) around a solitary object the viewer is challenged to look again at the object and reevaluate the entire image.

It also raises the great question 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.