New work by these artists draws on social science methods of participatory action research and reworks them towards a contemporary art (new media) installation.
This October 18, Surrey Art Gallery’s Techlab will host an afternoon open house for the ongoing digital media project Glocal. Already one year into the research, this new work by M Simon Levin, Jer Thorp and Sylvia Grace Borda draws on social science methods of participatory action research and reworks them towards a contemporary art (new media) installation over the next six months.
Taking issue with the ubiquitous and banal state of the image in the 21st century as a result of commonly-owned digital devices, these artists have sought to create new tools and conceptual practices that inspire the thoughtful production of images, despite the ease with which images are massed produced. By staging a series of workshops for individuals from different cultural locations such as artists, educators, students, as well as through an online submission process, this project invites participants to use 21st century photographic technologies to investigate, document and represent their quotidian movements through Greater Vancouver and its environs. Through the creation of custom-built software and hardware toolkits, meant to foster an individual’s thinking about, and ability to make digital images, the Glocal project collects visual data from a distributive network of participants. The evolving new media installation, currently a prototype, is designed to reconfigure collective imaginaries by documenting, representing and reworking social spaces, using interactive display technologies. It will allow viewers’ physical movements to configure their own visual representations of the research data or to explore the images through the aid of computer-generated similarity maps.
This early afternoon open house event, provides an opportunity for visitors to generate images using the custom-built software and hardware toolkits, to experience the interactive prototype, and to learn about the methodology that will create Canada’s largest contributive digital artwork. Please see www.glocal.ca
For directions please visit: http://www.surrey.ca/Living+in+Surrey/Arts/Surrey+Art+Gallery/About+the+Gallery/visitor+info.htm
