Fashion City was a project that involved the creation of a database of images that explored the fashionable nature of Melbourne. These images where collected through various walks within the city. These images where then edited and curated through their placement into labeled folders. Images could be submitted via email or sms. One of the main outputs of Fashion City was through the image sequencer that played on the screens at Federation Square. This system generated a continuous stream of sequenced image montage.
The sequencer worked with three levels of images that had different properties for playback that could be affected via an XML sequence. The middle layer was a layer that always operated via random discussions on which a body of images would be used for playback. The other two layers had dedicated image sets that could be selected via the XML or set to random, depending upon the desires of the composer, the one that wrote the XML.
This ability to sequence the image patterns with different levels of control was an attempt to draw together a cohesive representation of the images that represented our movements and walks through the city and our engagement with the topic that framed the project. So in this project images where collected and curated with a defined set of rules applied to it, the curation of these images took the images away from the place that they where taken and placed with in a folksonomy.
In contrast the video database that I have been creating during my masters does not place such defined structures around the curation and collection of the clips. The video database is used in real time video performance and is made up of self-filmed performance, car drives, social movement and various built locations that I have encountered and explored. This database is ordered via place and date, leaving the database free to be used with out the possible constraints of labels.
With in these two models of collection and creation it becomes interesting to think of the required knowledge of the collections in order to work with them. In fashion city, it was a knowledge of the images that was required but a knowledge of the tagging system used to order the collection. In the video library there is a real need to know the clips as the folder naming system and the file naming system only gives a very limited clue to the video within. In this respect, as it stands, the video collection of mine is a very personal space, but one that is known by other people through my performances.