Here are some random screen grabs of the work as it unfolded in 2 minute intervals on flowvancouver.com.
While Flow was located at 1 Kingsway, Vancouver (2009-2023), Fiona created a way for the visiting public from anywhere in the world to witness the work unfold online 24/7 for 13 years, via this website.
Over the course of the day, the onsite computer constantly transitioned dynamically from one scene to another, every two minutes. In accordance with that progression, very two
minutes, stills of the work were uploaded to the this website, so that anyone worldwide coule, at any time of day or night, view impressions of the work as it unvolded live.
Sometimes the stills would capture full scenes, sometimes scenes in transition or scenes disappearing or appearing.
Starting in August of 2025, Flow Online will be launched, so that the work will unfold live in it's full expression including transitions and live mixing of images.
Flow shifts between live tableaus in which hundreds of photographic portraits and altered landscapes, shot by Fiona Bowie, are blended and projected onto the changing surface.
The scenes change every two to four minutes. The transitions from one scene to another are so slow that a face is sometimes barely discernable over a background - prompting several
people to characterize this aspect of work as having a dream like or hallucinatory quality.
A system custom-designed by Bowie and Sidney Fels allows figures shot at different times to appear as if they simultaneously present, with a core group of these individuals (both
animal and human) recurring in a manner that implicitly suggests they're part of a larger narrative.
Images that are linked (or 'friended' to eachother), so that they appear with varying frequency: some are coded as best friends, aquaintences, strangers etc., affecting the
frequency with which they appear over the course of hours, days, weeks or months.
These dynamic super-impositions also embrace unlikely combinations: disparate F-stops combine the blurred edges of portraits upon clear backgrounds and purposefully contrary
lighting schemes; coded zooming functions and behavioural attributes, no image will exactly repeat. Due to the multitude of images and coding variations, no image is exactly
repeated.
all images copyright Fiona Bowie 2009-2023 with the exception of pre 1920 archive images (use granted for Flow), copyright City of Vancouver Archives.
