iSummiters are in for a treat at this year's event thanks to David Harris and his team who will be providing us with a sneak preview to their Global Lives installation.

The Global Lives project aims to collect footage of 24 hours in the life of ten people who roughly represent the world's population.  Eventually, 240 hours of unedited footage will be exhibited in an immersive, floor-to-ceiling installation that includes ten viewing rooms and a circular viewing chamber to see moments of the ten lives simultaneously.

David explained, "The immediate aim is to transport people out of their own lives and into the daily realities of people and places that they otherwise would never have known. Our goal in doing this is to provoke people to rethink their relationships with the rest of the world by thinking of people in other places and cultures as individuals, not just as abstract statistics or subjects of sporadic news reporting."

Participants in the project are selected using a "process of elimination procedure" based on geography, gender, age, income and religion, in order to present a true reflection of the world's inhabitants. Check out a simulation of the subject selection process on the Global Lives site by clicking on the 'Choose participants' tab.

So far, a day in the life of a US cable car driver in San Francisco and a Brazilian musician/city permit inspector has been documented, and shoots in Malawi and Japan have also taken place. Footage from these shoots has been shared on Global Lives' new community portal, where you can take a sneak peak before the summit.

While screenings of shorter versions of the videos have been shown in Brazil and New York, the actual installation has not been implemented yet, that is, not until the imminent iSummit in Sapporo. The footage from the four shoots will be shown in an installation that is an offshoot of Global Lives' original exhibition plan. According to David: "The format will be a bit different - a less complex structure in an open room will be an experiment to see how people react to being surrounded by video of other realities."

The installation will be set up in the main hall of the Sapporo Convention Centre. David hopes that attendees will experience a sense of immersion and dislocation, that "through the medium of video a concrete sense of having participated through our work in the life of a person on the other side of the globe."

The Global Lives project is run with collaboration at the heart of its production process. They encourage passionate filmmakers around the globe to either run or participate in a shoot and have published a 'How to do a 24 hour shoot' video guide that makes their recording model easily adaptable to local circumstances. They have also recently launched a translation coordination space on their community portal, for volunteers to collaborate around translating the footage. Find out how you can get involved here.

 



Pictures: Global Lives street cinema in Brazil by deharris on flickr.com, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0