Urban Flow

Adam Magyar is a Hungarian photographer based in Berlin who is creating a stir in the international photography world by combining still photography and video in a way that explores the density and anonymity of urban life. His premiere work, called Urban Flow, combines multiple images of pedestrians into very long panoramas. By slowing time, from 12 seconds into 8 minutes of HD footage, he reveals the minute details of urban life normally invisible to the naked eye -- and transforms the way we view images, making them more interactive and intimate.

Magyar appeared at this week's annual PopTech conference in Camden, Maine, describing his use of industrial machine-vision cameras as "slit-scan" scanning technology that captures moments in time in a way that was previously impossible using conventional optical cameras. Magyar told the PopTech crowd he is attempting to combine science and art to "look into and challenge our identities as individuals in the urban crowd."

"I used to do street photography," Magyar said, "but my photos always revolved more around a theory or urban space than a single image, and so it occurred to me to make that theory an image."

"In my images, I stage a situation where people are seen from a distance and I depict them as particles in a system," Magyar says. In the work, Stainless, a short photo-video montage (excerpt above), Magyar scans "rushing subway trains arriving to stations. The images record people staring towards their destinations, standing at the doors of trains, framed by the sliding door windows. "They are scrutinizing the uncertain future," Magyar says. In all of his images, the main theme is arrival, the rhythms of life, "sections of infinite time flowing by relentlessly, like our own life spans," he says.

It is stark but stunning work. Stainless stretches 12 seconds of real time on a crowded train platform in Berlin into 24:44 minutes, suspending the busy crowd in time, rendering his subjects as free-standing images, frozen in hyper slow-motion, as if in collage.

Check out a shorter excerpt of his work here:

Adam Magyar: Stainless (excerpt) from Urban Video Project on Vimeo.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photo, above: Adam Magyar speaking at PopTech conference courtesy PopTech]

YouTube Art

The establishment art world has finally acknowledged online video as an art form. Here are six of the 25 YouTube videos chosen from among more than 23,000 submissions from 91 countries for The Guggenheim Museum's first-ever exhibit of online video, YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video. Chief Curator Nancy Spector said the videos represent "the most unique, innovative, groundbreaking video work being created and distributed online during the past two years."

The jury for the Guggenheim-YouTube collaboration included the band Animal Collective, film director Darren Aronofsky and photographer Marilyn Minter. All 25 videos were projected on the outside of the museum in Manhattan Thursday night. [OK Go, known for its inventive music videos, performed live.]

To see more of the Top 25, go here.

What do you think? Let us hear from you.

- Marcia Stepanek

Vlogspotting

Video blogging—vlogging–seems more cause-minded than ever.

New-and-improved digital video-sharing sites with names like Vimeo, blip.tv, Flickr video, Seesmic, and Viddler are making it easier for citizen activists to share their concerns about the world around them. One new storytelling form emerging on these sites is the short, "cause vlog" —brief, home-made mini-documentaries meant to create community around issues close to home.

Here are a couple of recent examples:

* Bike-Lane Emergency from Nicholas Whitaker on Vimeo. Whitaker attaches his camera to his handlebars and takes us for a dangerous, humorous spin through the streets of New York City.




* River Reactions from Kevin Co on Vimeo. Co uses a combination of news and original footage to raise safety concerns over the proposed construction of a nuclear reactor in his Yukon River village in Alaska.




Want to distribute your cause vlog globally? That's easier now, too: Dot.sub is a Web service that lets cause activists publish their docs with subtitles in other languages—and makes it possible for others to add subtitles of their own, in other languages. Viewers, meanwhile, can choose their preferred language for watching.

Founder Michael Smolens wanted to substantially remove language and cost as a barrier to cross-cultural communication using video. "I remember thinking after I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004 that if one documentary film in English could have an impact on a very close U.S. Presidential election, imagine if all independent and documentary films, TV programming, and video from all cultures could be made available in all languages," Smollen says.

Look for wider use of vlogging by nonprofits in coming months. Here's how one, the global citizen news community, Rising Voices, is using dotSUB to distribute an informational video about its work in more than a dozen languages. Click here to see its vlog.