JER THORP

Collaborators:

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M. Simon Levin

Sylvia Grace Borda

Dennis Rosenfeld

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Role: Lead Artist

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The Glocal Project was a massive contributive artwork, commissioned by the Surrey Art Gallery. Two months before the launch of the project, we already had upwards of 8,000 submissions from more than 2,000 participants around the world.

 

One of the most challenging questions was: how can we make sense of such a large collection of images?

 

These 'phylogenies' imagine how an anthropologist might attempt to build relationships between images in the Glocal Pool.

 

Through image analysis technology, each image in the pool is assigned a 'signature', which can be though of as the image's genome - the colours, composition, symmetry, etc. that define the image.

 

In these phylogenetic trees, pairs of images are 'bred' to produce offspring which could conceivably have been born from these parent images.

 

The result is a 'family tree' of images which attempts to invent a history inside of the large project pool.