collaborative images

March 19, 2005 5:19 AM

Fellow automatically combines 50 Flickr images with the same tag into a single image. So who owns the copyright? Heh.
posted by jeremias (29 comments total)

Wow.
posted by Ynoxas at 5:28 AM on March 19, 2005

Awesome hack. I vaguely recall a similar blend involving porn that was the safest-for-work nudes the Internet will ever see. My favorite of these pictures is the seasons.
posted by rcade at 5:53 AM on March 19, 2005

Brilliant.
posted by GooseOnTheLoose at 5:55 AM on March 19, 2005

I don't get it. They all just look like big smudges. Meh.
posted by OffTopic at 6:14 AM on March 19, 2005

Heh.. Reminds me a little of the "every Playboy centerfold" C-prints.
posted by dabitch at 6:20 AM on March 19, 2005

Thank you, dabitch, it was driving me crazy trying to remember where I'd seen this phenomenon before.

As for taste, I'm with OffTopic. But I don't like Rothko either.
posted by sninky-chan at 6:31 AM on March 19, 2005

some of these are really gorgeous... thanks!
posted by moonbird at 6:47 AM on March 19, 2005

They remind me of Vincent Gallo's mediocre paintings. Only better.
posted by fire&wings at 7:07 AM on March 19, 2005

Beautiful. They remind me of paintings by Rebecca Purdum, which last told were selling for about $18,000 each.
posted by alms at 7:21 AM on March 19, 2005

dabitch: do you know if those are available for purchase? I saw the book linked at amazon, but I'd love having a big print of one of those.

Did you notice the gradual change from brunette to blonde over the decades?

Fascinating.
posted by Ynoxas at 7:50 AM on March 19, 2005

clarification: of course I mean prints or reproductions, not the originals, I'm no art collector, I just like cool things.
posted by Ynoxas at 7:51 AM on March 19, 2005

Great link. Thanks. My fave is the eye. I do wonder why 50 is the mix number. I'd be curious about the effects of increasing and decreasing the sample size.
posted by mmahaffie at 7:59 AM on March 19, 2005

Very pretty. I like this. Good post.

I am very sure a strong argument could be made that brevity has the copyright. I don't know, though. It's all tricky down in that funny country.
posted by blacklite at 8:22 AM on March 19, 2005

I am very sure a strong argument could be made that brevity has the copyright.

The creator has licensed the work under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license, which allows others to make derivative works. I assume he selected photos which themselves were also released under a CC license.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 9:00 AM on March 19, 2005

That would make sense. :)

Ynoxas, sorry no idea. Couldn't find anything on salavon's site, except that he represented by the project galleries where one might buy prints, or at the very least get information.
posted by dabitch at 9:13 AM on March 19, 2005

Interesting idea , maybe less than 50 images would be better though.
posted by sgt.serenity at 10:27 AM on March 19, 2005

Copyright isn't a hard question here. The people who owned the photos before the derivative work still own the photos, and presumably licensed their work for the derivative work. The author of the derivative work has rights on the derivative work.
posted by mendel at 10:30 AM on March 19, 2005

rothko! looks awesome
posted by Satapher at 10:38 AM on March 19, 2005

Its an interesting concept and I kind of like the abstract images that come out of it.

sgt.serenity, it might be a better idea with 10 images. Maybe he should set the program to make an image of each stage of the process as each image is added, to find the ideal spot to stop adding. As backlite says above.
posted by fenriq at 11:22 AM on March 19, 2005

Interesting, I never saw the Salavon centerfolds but say some nice Santas and wedding pictures in Cabinet magazine. The difference between images based on the mean and those based on the median were interesting.
The flickr images seem based on the median.

Oh and anyone familar with python can grab the programs and play it seems.
posted by kingfisher, his musclebound cat at 12:26 PM on March 19, 2005

i'd love to see it animated. from 1 to 100
posted by hypnorich at 12:26 PM on March 19, 2005

Nice. Some lovely images.

I'm a little bugged about the way he credits Salavon. He says the photos are "partially inspired" by Salavon. But it looks like he's faithfully mimicking Salavon's works, trying to get as close as he can to them. It doesn't look like he's "inspired" to try something different in terms of the visual end result.

I'm not yelling "he's a ripoff and he sucks". Making derivative works is a good and necessary exercise in art or in coding. And he's produced good results. And he's making good use of Flickr API and photos. But if he's going to reuse an idea and acknowledge doing so, he might as well credit the person he's borrowing from more accurately than "partially inspired".
posted by shortfuse at 1:06 PM on March 19, 2005

I was bothered by crediting his was as "partially inspired by the work of Jason Salvon." It looks like he's faithfully mimicking Salavon's works, after all it's just an algorithm applied to a set of pictures. How much was it varied? Or was the twist the use of flickr?

This post was partially inspired by the post of shortfuse.
posted by kingfisher, his musclebound cat at 2:36 PM on March 19, 2005

Ha ha. Nicely done.
posted by shortfuse at 3:16 PM on March 19, 2005

brevity appears to be a MeFite. A very quiet one, at that.

[this is good]
posted by casu marzu at 4:32 PM on March 19, 2005

Those are beautiful.
posted by BoringPostcards at 7:29 PM on March 19, 2005

The script is fun to play with even if you don't know python. For anyone vaguely interested, I recommend you install python and give it a whirl. The novelty wears off, but it is a fun way to acquaint yourself with python. (After altering the script a bit [with the help of brevity] I generated one based on my photos tagged "signs" and one based on some polaroids by Flickrer, Thank You For Shopping.
posted by shoepal at 10:44 PM on March 19, 2005

The people who owned the photos before the derivative work still own the photos, and presumably licensed their work for the derivative work.

If he didn't license them, would it be unethical to create a derivative work that's so clearly divorced from its origins? No one could look at one of those images and find his own work.
posted by rcade at 5:58 AM on March 20, 2005

Did anyone else experience a Rorschach-like quality while viewing these?

Or is that just the drugs kicking in?
posted by Enron Hubbard at 8:07 AM on March 20, 2005