Ubiquitous Photography and Web 3.0

So today in class, we had a presentation about ubiquitous photography and Web 3.0, both topics that especially young people in the 21st century should be aware of, as they relate to our daily and excessive use of smartphones and the constant urge to be online. 

Social networks such as Flickr or Facebook are a crucial part of our everyday life and they have drastically changed our society in the past few years. Thus, 'the culture of connectivity', is an expression that increasingly  gains importance nowadays, but at the same time it also rises the question if there is a real culture of connectivity or if the urge to constantly be connected is just destroying and killing us and everything around us. (A question that I'm gonna focus on more in a separate post relating to my project development.) 

However,  before going into more detail about what they discussed in the presentation,  I just quickly want to draw your attention to José van Dijck's article Flickr and the Culture of Connectivity, (that I've already briefly mentioned in a previous post) because it closely relates to the presentation topic. 

In this chapter, Dijck analyses the social network Flickr and  particularly emphasizes the fact that, the platform is a collective memory and that the notion of sharing photos leads to collective perspectives and experiences. This is also reflected by Flickr's motto 'Share your photos. Watch the world.' 

But, going back to the presentation topic, I think it might be useful to also explain the word 'ubiquitous' at this point because it can help to make us aware of photography in relation to our excessive use of smartphones. 

Ubiquitous, is the present, that which can be found everywhere, something omnipresent. 

In our society nowadays we take photographs everywhere of everything and afterwards we often upload these pictures and share them online. BUT: as already mentioned in the post about glitch and databending in relation to Michael Wolf, this rises the question of copyright and authorship. 

What we often don't realize or underestimate is that we loose control over what happens with the stuff we share, the minute we post our image and send it out to the online world, a world that is uncontrollable and unbelievably huge and complex. And it is a fact, that there is basically no authorship for pictures that we share online, anybody can do whatever they want with our pictures and we have absolutely no control over it, kinda frightening, isn't it? 

Before analysing some of the artists that appeared in the presentation, I just quickly want to mention, what I thought was a really interesting conversation, we had when talking about ubiquitous photography. We raised the question if the act of constantly taking pictures of everything isn't actually kind of 'killing' photography as a form of art. 

Can we consider a selfie, as a piece of art just because it's photography? And can we even consider a selfie as 'real' photography? Of course we can't!! But then where are the boundaries? Where do we draw a line between that which is photography as art and that which is just nonsense? 

I know this question might seem easy at first, of course a selfie or a picture of someone's car isn't photography! But then again, there are pictures of rubbish or random everyday objects that we do consider as serious photography, so I think that although one might have the intuition to make a clear cut between the two, when giving the idea of random pictures as opposed to real photography a second thought, it might not be so easy anymore to make a difference. 

Penelope Umbrico is an American artist and features pictures in her work that she's found on search engines or photo sharing websites. 

Her project ‘Suns', for instance, is basically a collage of hundreds of different pictures Umbrico found when searching the word 'sunset' on Flickr. This collage also shows the lack of authorship on photo sharing websites. Someone can just take your picture, hang it into a gallery and make a fortune with it, without you even noticing. 

       

London based artist, Erica Scourti rises a very interesting and  crucial question in her work: ‘how can a creative individual be recognised as unique, when Instagram has made everyone’s photographs look the same?’ A question which might make us think about our individuality, in a world that is controlled by new technologies and social networks. Isn't it true that when scrolling through selfies of our friends on Instagram, we realize that although all of them look different, they are all the same? 

-      Scourti concentrates particularly on this issue of maintaining individuality in the online world, in her project 'So Like You'. The project is supposed to rise the question what happens to personal and individual experience, especially in the times of Instagram and other social networks, where none of our snapshots stands out anymore. Scourti started her project by uploading photographs from her own archive to Google's reverse image search engine for analysis. That's how she discovered other photographs  from different people all over the world that have shared pictures with a pretty similar 'visual footprint'. The most interesting part about this project might be the fact that the artist then contacted these people, asked them for permission to use their pictures in her work but also asked them to send her similar pictures from their archives and descriptions to the images. 

German artist Joachim Schmid's work mainly consisted of finding and appropriating photographs rather than creating his own.

     His work 'Photogenetic Drafts' consists of a series of constructed headshots which address questions of identity, gender,  personality, etc...

-   His work mostly features authorless photographs arranged in chronological order. It is compelling because of the mystery behind them (who is on the photo? What’s the story behind it? ), but at the same time it also kind of reflects Schmid's concern with photography as a social discourse and as something ubiquitous and omnipresent in our daily life. 

Reading:

JJosé van Dijck - Flickr and the Culture of Connectvity: Sharing views, experiences, memories

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