Via Institute for the Future

 The IFTF Gallery for the Future at 201 Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto presents the work of multi-disciplinary artists who engage with temporality through new media tools and creative approaches to design and aesthetic production. Our rotating exhibits will relate to the same futures themes that we approach through our research and labs. IFTF is thrilled to present our inaugural exhibit, a collection of video works by the Global Lives Project, produced from 2004 to 2014.

Artist’s Statement

Framed by the arc of the day and conveyed through the intimacy of video, we have slowly and faithfully captured 24 continuous hours in the lives of twenty people from around the world. They are screened here in their own right, but also in relation to one another.

There is no narrative other than that which is found in the composition of everyday life, no overt interpretations other than that which you may bring to it.

By extending the long take to a certain extreme and infusing it with the spirit of cinema verité, we invite audiences to confer close attention onto other worlds, and simultaneously reflect upon their own. The force and depth of human difference and similarity are revealed in this process. Gaps which mark cultural divides feel, at once, both wider and narrower. This sense—that we, as humans, are both knowable and unknowable, fundamentally different as well as the same—opens a space for dialogue.

Sometimes projects with the simplest premises are the most complicated to execute, and this can be said for Global Lives.

Hundreds of volunteers from around the world make up our collective. Some are filmmakers and photographers, others are programmers and engineers, some are architects and designers, others are students and scholars—all are everyday people in their own contexts; each has participated according to his or her own motivations. They have donated, quite literally, thousands of hours towards bringing this project into being. This installation offers us an opportunity to thank them, along with the generous communities that collaborated with us in each of these shoots.

This project is designed to remain a work-in-progress. Volunteers are subtitling all 480 hours of footage in their original languages and translating them into English and beyond. These videos for the basis of our online, participatory library of human life experience—the other major venue for our work. We continue to accept new footage for our expanding archive—fresh additions to an evolving visual conversation.

The Global Lives Collective, 2014