John Ewing C

Title: Symphony of a City (SOAC)

Symphony of a City (SOAC) was a public cyberart project designed to create dialogue and bring awareness to the housing crisis and community organizing in Boston. Dynamic individuals, from a homeless person to a multi-millionaire, were nominated by over 50 community groups from across Greater Boston, to wear tiny video cameras on their heads and document life from their perspective for a day. Eight citizens were selected. They recorded everything from the moment they got up until they went to bed. The project premiered at the 2001 Boston Cyberarts Festival where over the course of two days the videos the participants generated were streamed unedited in real-time on the Web and projected onto the facade of Boston City Hall. The video from each of the participants was juxtaposed so that at any given moment four stories, four lives, four perspectives were in view. TheMTh web audience could control, through their browsers, which audio they wanted to listen to, switching back and fourth between the feeds and developing their own edit as they watched. Viewing centers were established at community organizations around the city and an educational guide was made for use in schools.

While traditional documentaries focus the camera on their subjects, SOAC pointed the camera away from them, capturing instead the subjects' point of view. This allowed the subjects to choose what was recorded and the audience to edit their own experience. The approach raised many questions. Was it possible to tell the race and class of the person wearing the camera by the way they were talked to or looked at, or by the spaces they moved through? Who had access to certain parts of the city and who did not? Would the revelation of the minutiae of people's lives translate into intimacy and identification with the characters, or simply be chaotic and boring?

Symphony of a City used the media, schools, community centers, city plaza, and the Internet to generate attention to the housing crisis and the huge economic disparity that we encounter but ignore on a daily basis. The emphasis was less on aesthetics than on politics, activism and social relationships. It was as much community organizing as art, and as much about experimenting with the process of filming as it was about the final film. It was centered on the everyday and the banal, as opposed to a series of spectacular moments. By adapting surveillance technology, we hoped to show race and class disparity and how it plays out on a daily level, minute by minute.

note: Documentation of Symphony of A City exists in many forms. WGBH

Television commissioned and aired a documentary about it, a film was created by participants which was shown at Coolidge Corner theatre, it has been exhibited in several galleries and a (rather dense) web site has descriptions, video clips, photos, press coverage, educational materials etc., I have assembled a sampling of this material for this application. If the project is selected for exhibition, any of this material or combination could be used for display in the exhibition, depending on the objectives of the curator.

John Ewing