Average Photos Study
This comes via John Michael Boling on Rhizome. The video was posted on Vimeo by a user named KitschPatrol who wrote:
every day, flickr deems 500 photographs from its database "interesting."
(flickr.com/explore/interesting/)
each frame of this video represents the average of one day's 500 interesting photographs.
in series, the video frames document each day's average interestingness between July 1, 2004 and July 1, 2007.
this video is a study for a larger-scale, interactive representation of similar data.
I believe the artist is Eric Mika, whose KitschPatrol website is a bit overdue to launch (the webpage says to check back on January 17th).
It'll be interesting to find out what the larger-scale project is... I like the concept & effect, but am feeling there might be a better source--something with more evocation--than Flickr's daily interesting photos.
posted by Ethan at
8:55 AM
3 Comments:
Interesting. I kept stopping it: each frame is a nice-looking impressionistic abstract. Not bad at all.
I'm curious, what do you think would be something with more evocation? Or the better question would be, evocative of what? To me, this piece fluid transient nature of existence. It's like hearing a room full of chatter. It's indiscernible and without meaning as a whole.
I'm not sure what would work better (though I'm hopeful the artist has something in mind since it's indicated that the project is a study for another piece)...
I guess I'm left wondering if the artist is really interested in the idea of "most interesting photos" or if they were mainly a convenient repository on which to test the algorithm.
I feel like the project is close to something, but is missing that last 10% to really make it click (again, this isn't really a huge criticism given that it's a "study").
Maybe it's that "most interesting" flickr photos seems too wonky (and I'm saying this as a artist who uses the Flickr API :) and something that's a little closer to peoples' general experiences would work better for me (perhaps the average of all the frames of a movie or tv episode?).
This brings to mind a photo I saw a while back (in Art in America?) where the photographer took a photo of 2 people having sex and with many multiple over exposures taken over the entire act. The result was a photo whose center was a blur of flesh color with discernible limbs at the periphery.
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