I went all the way to Foam in Amsterdam for this:
"Erik Kessels (KesselsKramer, Amsterdam) | Photography in
abundance
"Through the digitalisation of photography and the rise of sites
such as Flickr and Facebook, everyone now takes photos, and
distributes and shares them with the world - the result is countless
photos at our disposal. Kessels visualises 'drowning in pictures of
the experiences of others', by printing all the images that were
posted on Flickr during a 24-hour period and dumping them in the
exhibition space. The end result is an overwhelming presentation of a
million prints."
And those mounds are fake: there are built mounds underneath them, and the photos are stuck to them, a thin layer that is nowhere near a million photos. This is sad. We don't know how many photos are actually uploaded each day, and this is a totally unreliable visualisation, undermining its entire point.
Oh well.
russelldavies, antimega, robertogreco, straup, and 44 other people added this photo to their favorites.
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STML 18 months ago | reply
We shall build upon this and make it better! Tom is in charge of everything. Especially Health & Safety.
heather 18 months ago | reply
"Napkin Calculation" is my new stripper name.
Also, why can't I fave these comments? Think, Flickr... think!
straup 18 months ago | reply
Things I Can't Fave is not a lie, Heather.
gusseting 18 months ago | reply
heather - so you can be several orders of magnitude out? *boom, tish*
we should be able to roll in the photos, and get high on the development chemicals - added bonus reward on kickstarter?
iamdanw 18 months ago | reply
Ben Terrett 18 months ago | reply
Let's put all the people from Explore on a container ship.
straup 18 months ago | reply
"Let's put all the people from Explore on a container ship" will be the name of the Flickr tell-all documentary film.
larry18_so 18 months ago | reply
the world can't function without lies.......
BlueisCoool 18 months ago | reply
I read about this and find this latest news a surprise. Very nice work - congrats on being explored !
STML 18 months ago | reply
I wrote to the curator and I received this email (I'm not entirely sure what it means):
"In the installation I'm trying to give a representation of the amount that is uploaded every day on Flickr. On October 6th I downloaded for 24 hours the images tagged as 'IMG' and in weight higher than 900K. This resulted in 950.000 downloaded images. I wanted to show the photographs as a sea of images, therefore I had to create the 'hollow mountains' in the installation. But the volume represents these 950.000 images. I'm sorry if I have disappointed you with this, but hope this mail will clear things up a little bit."
STML 18 months ago | reply
(For reference, flickr.photos.search returns 1,479,542 for that date, although how he got the 900K bit I don't know.)
aka Jon Spence 18 months ago | reply
I don't see why the fact that this is a fake, undermines its entire point. All art is a "fake" of some kind - a representation of reality. From where I'm sitting that looks like a pile of between 900k and 1.4m photos. At the time of writing this post, your photo has had (a deserved, because it is interesting) 827 views, making it a photo that would be near the top of the pile on the day that it was a posted. Underneath it are pile upon pile of unviewed or little-viewed photos (including loads of mine!). This seems to me to make a valid point about flickr and Facebook and Web 2.0 generally, that we're all just creating an enormous dump of user content. And why not, so long as we're enjoying it! I think this message comes across, real of fake.
STML 18 months ago | reply
@Jon_Spence: I take your point, but that is not the declared point of the artwork, which specifically refers to "1 million printed photos", not a representation of that (or any other) number.
PunkToad 18 months ago | reply
Art doesn't specifically refer to anything. Art is an emotional exploration. If you can't suspend your disbelief you can't experience this particular piece.
Bopuc 18 months ago | reply
I like that you used hot pink for the text.
Also: youtu.be/bqNdsSXQgRI
:)
antimega 18 months ago | reply
This isn't an oak tree: if the art is about representing all the photos in a day, it should do that. That's the craft of the art. If it's about showing photos and saying *imagine* all the photos you might as well have an empty room.
straup 18 months ago | reply
If we're going to talk purely symbolic representations depicting the volume of photos uploaded I got yer oak tree, right here.
STML 18 months ago | reply
Thank you Chris - that's pretty much exactly what I meant, and the Craig-Martin is a particularly good example.
OKOW 18 months ago | reply
arrr crap, boo to that..
bosscock 14 months ago | reply
I really liked that exhibition till 5 minutes ago....thats put a downer on the day... at least the easter bunny will be coming soon...