1 day worth of Flickr uploads

smash

Artist Erik Kessler's exhibit at the Foam gallery in Amsterdam features over 1 million printed pictures. Each print is a real photo that was uploaded to Flickr within one 24 hour day span. When specifically? He doesn't say.

Speaking to Creative Review, Kessels says that "We're exposed to an overload of images nowadays" and that "This glut is in large part the result of image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook, and picture-based search engines. Their content mingles public and private, with the very personal being openly and unselfconsciously displayed. By printing all the images uploaded in a 24-hour period, I visualize the feeling of drowning in representations of other peoples' experiences."

It's in interesting statement on how "social" our digital lives are. Nowadays, we share photos without a second thought. For all you know your photos could be in that gallery and you don't even know it! Maybe it's time we step back, and look carefully at what we share instead of uploading every blurry and lousy photo from our memory cards to Flickr and Facebook.

Cool idea but as an artist, he should really understand copyright. Surely this breaches it?

Maybe one of your photos is in there somewhere.

Misa-san

I kinda want jump in one of the piles and roll around ... with protective clothing to avoid papercuts...

DaireQuinlan

smash wrote: »

Cool idea but as an artist, he should really understand copyright. Surely this breaches it?

Lively debate going on on twitter about just this. I don't think it does. The 'work' itself isn't reliant on any particular individual image, the totality of the work needs to be considered for any copyright considerations, it's arguably 'transformative' in its use of individual images and so qualifies under fair use. Like a collage or montage.

OTOH, IANAL

D.

Gregor Samsa

smash wrote: »

Cool idea but as an artist, he should really understand copyright. Surely this breaches it?

One would assume/hope that he and the gallery sought legal advice on this before he hit "print". It's not the kind of undertaking that's done on a whim. A lot of people, time and money would have to be involved in the planning and execution of something like this.

smash

DaireQuinlan wrote: »

Lively debate going on on twitter about just this. I don't think it does. The 'work' itself isn't reliant on any particular individual image, the totality of the work needs to be considered for any copyright considerations, it's arguably 'transformative' in its use of individual images and so qualifies under fair use. Like a collage or montage.

OTOH, IANAL

D.

So if I made and exhibited a collage of the mona lisa created with 1,000 of the world's most popular images from famous photographers it'd be ok?

Eirebear

Is anyone else trying to calculate the cost of printer ink in their heads right now.
I dread to think how much my little canon would guzzle for a million prints!

DaireQuinlan

smash wrote: »

So if I made and exhibited a collage of the mona lisa created with 1,000 of the world's most popular images from famous photographers it'd be ok?

That's where you get all lawyered up and hope for the best

CF Richard Price, Shepard Fairey and others ...

challengemaster

You'd be tempted to send an invoice and let them try trawl through all the prints and prove it's not there

magicbastarder

Eirebear wrote: »

Is anyone else trying to calculate the cost of printer ink in their heads right now.

i wonder what you'd find if you lifted the top layer of prints off that. you might find it's just stacks of unsold newspapers.
at 1c per print, it'd be over €100k to produce.

FoxT

It's a clever idea. Some random thoughts....

"Cool idea but as an artist, he should really understand copyright. Surely this breaches it?" I have no idea. Is the OP breaching copyright by posting them here?

At 1c a photo, the cost would be eu10k, not eu100k.

How did he actually get the photos out of flickr? The flickr folks must have collaborated on this. If you could locate each one, and download it, at a rate of 1 per second, would have taken about 300 hours....

It highlights the fact that for most people, the value of the photos they take is personal, rather than aesthetic/artistic.

Gets me thinking about my own photography.... I have 25,000 photos on my hard drive, most of them not that great. Where am I going/what am I doing with my own photography....


Ah, well, back to work..

smash

FoxT wrote: »

How did he actually get the photos out of flickr? The flickr folks must have collaborated on this. If you could locate each one, and download it, at a rate of 1 per second, would have taken about 300 hours....

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ - It would be pretty easy to write scraping software to refresh and grab every second. Then leave it run on a few PCs.

the_tractor

I think I see one of mine

im...LOST

FoxT wrote: »

How did he actually get the photos out of flickr? The flickr folks must have collaborated on this. If you could locate each one, and download it, at a rate of 1 per second, would have taken about 300 hours....

A custom built piece of software that uses the Flickr API would sort that problem. Very easy to do actually.

Effects

smash wrote: »

So if I made and exhibited a collage of the mona lisa created with 1,000 of the world's most popular images from famous photographers it'd be ok?

Yes. But you're not going to do that anyway.

melekalikimaka

its not breach of copyright, it would be at worst reapropriation, which seems to stand well against copyright. I can't see a problem tbh, its not like their profit being gained from any one individuals work...

dave66

I actually Emailed Foam out pure interest to ask what consideration had been given to copyright or the use of other peoples work in creating this piece of art. They tell me that the artist only downloaded/printed photos that had the creative commons licence permitting use by others. So, it's not all the uploads for the 24 hour period, still a huge amount and now has me wondering what is the ratio between people using creative commons free to use and people using (C)all rights reserved on flickr.

maddogcollins

According to this flickr user they are padded piles and not all photographs. Kind of takes away from it.