Public Participation project: Put Words In Our Mouths
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 over 13 years, via this website.
The public could also contribute text to the work via this online portal.
Over the course of the day, every two minutes, the work dynamically transitioned from one scene to another. In accordance with that progression, very two minutes, stills of the work were automatically uploaded to the front page of flowvancouver.com. Sometimes the stills would capture full scenes, sometimes scenes in transition or scenes disappearing or appearing. This 2 minute interval of still uploads to the site represents the speed of the internet portals in 2009, when the work was launched: the bandwidth of the time could not handle the data crunching necessary for live streams in (Flow's magnitude of resolution.*
Visitors to flowvancouver.com were invited to create an image containing subtitles via the link "Put words in our mouths", where they could choose from a number of phrases, in the form of pull down menus, penned by Fiona Bowie (her lyrics from SLickerslacker and Chopper) as well as excerpts of lyrics by bands who signed on to this component: The Residents, The New Pornographers and the Spores. Here, they could attribute phrases to characters or situations pictured within the work and able to play with dialogue until they were satisfied with their selections. Participant's subtitled mis-en-scenes were then saved into the Put Words In Our Mouths archive page. It was quite a large collection, shown in thumbnails that would be clicked on for full size.
Sadly, the website's archive was greviously hacked in 2019, and, our web host, quickly trying to avoid the virus from spreading, had to abort the site, (which subsequently had to be rebuilt from scratch by Bowie to avoid any malicious code). While her html of all the pages had been previously saved, the Flow Put Words In Our Mouths archive was lost, other than screengrabs Fiona would capture from time to time. Below are a number of those screengrabs showing examples of the archive.
The code for this component was written by Kay Higgins.
* This online component of Flow also allowed local viewers in Vancouver to see images unfold during the day, when the site image projectors at 1 Kingsway were off and the site's dynamic switch glass portals created views into and out of the building.
(When the work is relaunched as a live stream in summer of 2025 however, (Flow still runs flawlessly on its macmini), the work will be able to flow in realtime on this website.)
Sampling of Participants contributions
all images copyright Fiona Bowie 2009-2025 with the exception of pre 1920 archive images (use granted for Flow), copyright City of Vancouver Archives.