Your Email:

Friend's Email:

Note: (optional)

Subject:

Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/58093/full/58093/ten-windows-to-the-world-former-diller-teen-creates-a-unique-video-and-audi/ <br /><br /> <b>Ten windows to the world: Former Diller Teen creates a unique video and audio installation</b> <br /> Thursday, May 20, 2010 | by stacey palevsky <br /><br /><p>The sound of the world is echoing in a corner gallery at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.</p> <p>Voices from China are blending together with various sounds from Lebanon and Serbia. Noises from Kazakhstan and Malawi are hard to distinguish from the audio from the United States. Indonesia, Japan, India and Brazil are also part of this most interesting aural collage — the Global Lives Project.</p> <p>The various voices and sounds are coming out of dozens of speakers connected to 10 television screens — one for each country in the exhibit. Each screen is simultaneously showing a video (subtitled in English) from 24 hours in one person’s daily life. Collectively, the 10 people onscreen roughly represent the arc of human diversity based on geography, income, education, gender, religion and age.</p> <p>The project — in San Francisco through June 20 — was created and coordinated by David Evan Harris, a 29-year-old Jew from Los Altos. The video installation at YBCA marks the first time all 10 documentaries are being shown together in one place.</p> <p> </p> <div class="capDivLeft" style="width: 360px;"><img alt="Aglobal lives1" class="left" height="237" src="/images/uploads/y_photos_2010/ze05_21_10/Aglobal lives1.jpg" title="David Evan Harris" width="360" /> <div class="caption">David Evan Harris</div> </div> “This is a very, very rough attempt to ask what it is to experience 24 hours in the human body,” Harris said. <p> </p> <p>On Wednesday, May 26, Harris will speak about the project as a part of “Meet the Change,” a quarterly program of the AJWS-Avodah partnership that highlights Bay Area Jewish activists.</p> <p>“Tikkun olam and tzedakah … are foundational concepts to my understanding of the world and the way I decide to live my life,” Harris said. “It’s clear to me that a lot of who I am came from growing up in the Bay Area Jewish community.”</p> <p>Harris attended Los Altos Hills’ Congregation Beth Am, where through field trips to Buddhist temples and Christian churches he got his first taste of how big, bright and diverse the world really is. That understanding deepened when he went to Israel with the Diller Teen Fellows.</p> <p>“It was a really mind-opening experience,” he recalled. A week spent in Egypt and Jordan after the Israel trip further illustrated to him that “the world was much more complex than Temple Beth Am and the Palo Alto JCC and the Silicon Valley.”</p> <p> </p> <div class="capDivLeft" style="width: 360px;"><img alt="Aglobal lives2" class="left" height="239" src="/images/uploads/y_photos_2010/ze05_21_10/Aglobal lives2.jpg" title="James Bullock, 57, is a San Francisco cable car operator who gets up early to surf at Ocean Beach." width="360" /> <div class="caption">James Bullock, 57, is a San Francisco cable car operator who gets up early to surf at Ocean Beach.</div> </div> He got the idea for the Global Lives Project when, as a student at U.C. Berkeley, he participated in a one-year study abroad program in which students lived with families in multiple countries while they studied international development and global ecology. <p> </p> <p>“It was the intimacy of those families that I wanted to communicate on film,” Harris said.</p> <p>He succeeded. Because the videos showcase fairly average people with fairly average lives, viewers feel as though they are peering through a window to the other side of the world. The videos are unedited, although footage of people sleeping has been left out of this exhibit.</p> <p>We watch Kai Liu begin his day at 2 a.m. in a Chinese village with a trip to the night market, where he purchases fruits and vegetables for 2,600 children who eat in the school cafeteria where he works.</p> <p>We watch as 5-year-old Zhanna Dosmailova rides a scooter around her neighborhood in Kazakhstan and has pillow fights with her friends.</p> <p>And we see James Bullock of San Francisco wake up at 5 a.m. to surf at Ocean Beach, before his eight-hour shift as a California Street cable car operator begins.</p> <p>“The instinct of most documentary filmmakers is to find politically charged situations, victims of tragedy or captivating subjects — but that is not what we’re about,” Harris said. “We’re about capturing the every day.”</p> <p> </p> <div class="capDivLeft" style="width: 360px;"><img alt="Aglobal lives6" class="left" height="241" src="/images/uploads/y_photos_2010/ze05_21_10/Aglobal lives6.jpg" title="Dadah, 32, an occasional farmworker from Sarimukti Village, Indonesia, is a practicing Muslim and mother of three. " width="360" /> <div class="caption">Dadah, 32, an occasional farmworker from Sarimukti Village, Indonesia, is a practicing Muslim and mother of three.</div> </div> Harris and a friend shot the first 24-hour documentary in 2004 in San Francisco. Two years later, while Harris worked on a graduate degree in sociology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, he organized a second shoot, this time of a 28-year-old hip-hop musician and city permit inspector named Rael. <p> </p> <p>Simultaneously, the 21-person, mostly Brazilian crew made a film about how to make a 24-hour documentary, explaining that anyone embarking on such a project needs about three full crews to work in eight-hour shifts, plus adequate equipment (video cameras, microphones and a whole lot of batteries for a continuous shoot).</p> <p>“I came at this, naively, as a sociologist thinking that video production was much easier than it actually is,” Harris said. “When I started working with professionals, I quickly came to realize what is unwatchable and what is watchable.”</p> <p>Of the 10 shoots, Harris was present for three, but he worked the cameras for only one (he has an unsteady hand, he said). Harris organized several of the shoots, while others were organized by filmmakers who saw his website and submitted a proposal to participate in the project.</p> <p>So far, 650 filmmakers, artists, photographers and designers have volunteered their time to work on the project. And more than 400 people around the globe have volunteered to translate the dialogue into English to insert subtitles into the videos. About 170 hours of the 240 hours of footage are translated.</p> <p>“I’ve seen more footage than anyone else but I still haven’t seen all of it,” Harris said.</p> <p> </p> <div class="capDivLeft" style="width: 360px;"><img alt="Aglobal lives3" class="left" height="239" src="/images/uploads/y_photos_2010/ze05_21_10/Aglobal lives3.jpg" title="Zhanna Dosmailova, 5, lives in Vannovka, Kazakhstan, where her parents run an orphanage." width="360" /> <div class="caption">Zhanna Dosmailova, 5, lives in Vannovka, Kazakhstan, where her parents run an orphanage.</div> </div> After the exhibit closes in San Francisco, Harris hopes to show the films at universities, museums and theaters around the world. <p> </p> <p>He wants to add more 24-hour documentaries to the collection, and he wants to create curriculum guides so teachers can better use the footage in their classrooms.</p> <p>“Ultimately, we want to get all of the raw footage in full high definition and online so anyone can download it for free from anywhere in the world,” Harris said. “Our goal is to share our work as widely as possible to have the greatest impact.”</p> <p><br /><strong>Global Lives Project</strong> is open during regular gallery hours, plus some special hours. Free. Information: <a href="http://www.ybca.org">http://www.ybca.org</a>.</p> <p><strong><br />“Meet the Change” </strong>with David Harris, 6 to 9 p.m. Wednesday, May 26 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St., S.F. Information: <a href="http://www.globallives.org">http://www.globallives.org</a>.</p>

Please enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below: