Liz Canner and John Ewing, creators, "Symphony of a City"

Liz Canner: We've had really good luck with local foundations, but some of the larger national foundations have not necessarily seen what we're doing as art. I think this is because it's new technology; it's a new way to use technology. It's combining a lot of different forms, including public art and documentary. It's a genre in itself. It's something new. So, in a sense, there's no way to judge it.

John Ewing: Throughout history whenever you've had an innovative new art form, people have always used the criticism that it's not art, whether it was the impressionist or it was Andy Warhol or the abstract artist. People always say, oh, that's not art, until it becomes part of the society.

Liz Canner: I called a major foundation to find out if our project fit into their guidelines. I was very surprised by the response I got, because for the most part we've gotten positive response from foundations. But this particular funder told us that our project was not art, that because we weren't holding the paintbrush, because we weren't doing this in the traditional way of editing a documentary the way you normally would, that this was not considered an art piece. It was just considered documentation and that's it, and that it wasn't really of value artistically.

This person had a very closed-minded idea of what public art was, what a documentary was. They said, well if you're not editing the footage, it's not a documentary.

John Ewing: Or if you're not holding the cameras, that's not a documentary.

Liz Canner: Projecting it onto city hall, all of the artistic elements of the web site, the use of the grid, the new approach to having the viewer be the one to make decisions about what to edit, what to watch, the interactivity of it that this new technology allows, wasn't something that they understood or cared about. So that was hard to hear, because we felt so strongly about it and had been working so hard on it. It was kind of a blow. I think that's probably the difficulty with anything that's new.

Test of a camera prototype

John Ewing: Normally when you make a documentary you have a professional shoot it and you have it edited down into segments, the parts that you want to keep. But in our case we're having somebody who has never used a camera before put it on their head, document their life, and then we're just showing it unedited, and so that the viewer actually has to make those selections.

Liz Canner: The idea is that we want you to feel like you're experiencing it live, that as you're watching this projection, as you're watching the streaming web footage, these lives that are so different from your own are going on around you at the exact same time. It's interactive on all levels: the subject is creating the footage, the viewer is determining the editing and what they want to watch.

John Ewing: One of the decisions that a filmmaker always has to make is how much they will put their own subjectivity into the film, and what we've decided to do is to try and leave as much of that as possible to the people who are in it, the subjects of the film.