Electrons are pulsing down miles of copper wire, through unknown number of circuit boards and back out again to polarise liquid crystals on a someone’s computer screen just to show an image loaded micro-seconds ago onto the flickr website.
People are pouring hundreds of images per second into flickr - seemingly senseless activity that’s open to anyone to contribute or view or even use.
Trying to make sense of this is staggering. What’s happening here? It has the feel of something hugely significant for humanity. Are we documenting the humanity in it’s ordinariness?
There are some tools that are organising and transforming this ordinary visual information into something extraordinary.
Have gander at (all links open in a new window)
flickrvision - images mashed with Google maps- tagnautica - visually organises and hyperlinks images based on tags
- flickrTV - a real time stream of tags
- fangdangle - spell using flickr images
- FlickrFling - mash an rss feed with images
- Camera Finder - flickr’s own commercial application which provides stats for the cameras used to take photos
- flickr Stick Figure - creates a new picture based on an idea from hundreds of other pictures tagged with the same idea.
- retrievr - discover images based on colour composition of what you sketch (try painting the whole square single a colour)
These new tools are helping me to make sense of this constant stream images.
Someday someone will realise something profound about the way we view ourselves and ourselves collectively by analysing these life-tools like flickr. Maybe we are just discovering global is the new local. Maybe we’re discovering the basic similarities and connections between our ordinary selves and everyone else. Maybe we’re discovering it is us are important and not those world leaders streaming through our old-world televisions and radios.
Does anyone else get equally gob smacked as I am with what’s happening?
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