The Glocal Project is a collaborative\, mu ltifaceted artist-led project that examines the changing role of digital im age making today. The digital revolution has included the global prolifera tion of millions of image-taking devices (such as digital cameras\, video r ecorders\, cell phones\, and PDAs) and the sharing of billions of images th rough online networking and archival sites (such as Flickr). As this democr atization of digital technologies makes the ability to make photographic im ages so ubiquitous\, Glocal is interested in looking at the implications of the changing roles and relations of images within the field of visuality. Glocal is particularly interested in exploring the construction and relevan ce of the “unique” or “originary” image in relation to the multiple or “mul titude”. How can an image retain its ‘unique’ nature as resistance against being subsumed into the multitude? How can we understand the nature of “uni queness”? Does it remain a relevant concept for digital image making? Throu gh an interactive installation as well as a series of on-line platforms\, G local examines the new digital lives of images.
Glocal has been in de velopment for the past year\, incubating in the Surrey Art Gallery’s TechLa b as an artist in residence project. Starting from scratch\, the team has d eveloped software tools\, and hardware gadgets\, and experimented with vari ous prototypes of presentation formats and interactivity models. At the sam e time\, the team has led various community engagement projects\, built cur riculum for numerous high school and university workshops\, and assembled a large networks of volunteers\, educators and supporters. For this event\, the Glocal artists will be presenting the culmination of their research/cre ation. Viewers will be able to interact with the touch-table prototype that explores the aggregation within their 20\,0000+ image archive\, and view a series of large software-generated photographic 'similarity structures'. These 'similarity structures' imagine how an anthropologist might attempt t o build relationships between images within the archive. Using an algorithm which calculates compositional similarity between images\, elaborate maps and phylogenetic trees are generated\, modeling possible links between imag es. These temporally unique visual structures attempt to examine the comple x relational environments that surround images in an online space.
LOCATION:Surrey Art Gallery GEO:41.640047;-87.832795 URL;VALUE=URI:https://ahva.ubc.ca/events/event/the-glocal-project-jer-thorp -m-simon-levin-sylvia-grace-borda/ END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 DTSTART:20081102T090000 TZNAME:PST END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR