Photographer and artist, Sylvia Grace Borda, has created the first explorative artworks in Google Street view in partnership with John M. Lynch. Entitled 'Farm Tableaux', the series captures farmers in Surrey, B.C. (Canada) enacting a routine activity, but unlike conventionally staged photographs, the observer can explore these framed compositions within an interactive Google Street View landscape. These choreographed scenes enable notions of expanded cinema to be encountered by the online viewer. Click through / scroll down for links to some of Borda's completed artworks.

Press Release

Photographer and artist, Sylvia Grace Borda, has created the first explorative artworks in Google Street view in partnership with Google Business Street view photographer, John M Lynch. 

The series entitled FARM TABLEAUX captures farmers in Surrey, B.C. (Canada) enacting a routine activity, but unlike conventionally staged photographs, the observer can explore these framed compositions within an interactive Google Street View landscape.

Borda tasked each of the TABLEAUX participants to stand motionless for periods of up to 30 minutes in order to be captured by Google cameras. In this way, Borda has cleverly reverse engineered photographic practices in which the slow exposures of 19th century photography resulted in studio sitters being propped up for several minutes to allow a portrait image to be recorded. The artist has staged her subjects so they become 3-dimensional portrait sitters caught in a glance by the camera in multiple viewpoints in space and time. The artist breaks with Sontag's notion of a singular frame to offer the viewer many viewpoints that are all available simultaneously in order to compose our own views, too.

These choreographed scenes enable notions of expanded cinema to be encountered by the online viewer. By the artist incorporating panoramas of farming landscapes using Google Street view, she has fundamentally expanded the vocabulary and notion of public space. Borda’s artwork becomes a distributed form of collectivity and a record of new visuality on the Internet.

FARM TABLEAUX pushes the boundaries of what constitutes contemporary online art and photography whilst also defining social connectedness in the context of a highly visual and hybrid ‘commons’ of geography, time and the tableau vivant.

Farm Tableaux works include

Medomist Farm Ltd, Surrey, BC, Canada
http://goo.gl/maps/1NgdN

Clover Valley Organic Farm, Surrey, BC, Canada
see http://goo.gl/maps/0MIhY

Finley's Rhododendrons,Surrey, BC, Canada
http://goo.gl/maps/Ah90q

Zaklan Heritage Farm, Surrey, BC, Canada 
http://goo.gl/maps/eKj9B

Rondriso Farm, Surrey, BC, Canada
http://goo.gl/maps/OtyuO

Your Comments