Now, breeding images sounds a little weird, but at the Glocal Project they have done just that.
Operating out of the Surrey Art Gallery’s Tech Lab, The Glocal Project is a collaborative, multifaceted artist-led project that examines the changing role of digital image making today. The digital revolution has included the global proliferation of millions of image-taking devices (such as digital cameras, video recorders, cell phones, and PDAs) and the sharing of billions of images through online networking and archival sites (such as Flickr). As this democratization of digital technologies makes the ability to make photographic images 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 relevance of the “unique” or “originary” image in relation to the multiple or “multitude”.
- How can an image retain its ‘unique’ nature as resistance against being subsumed into the multitude?
- How can we understand the nature of “uniqueness”?
- Does it remain a relevant concept for digital image making?
Through interactive installations as well as a series of on-line platforms, Glocal examines the new digital lives of images. One of these on-line platforms is the Glocal Image Breeder.
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.
A definate must-see (and must-try)!
