creativity/machine

Museumr is a new 3rd party flickr toy that lets you stick your own photo in a frame at your choice of museum. More museumr photos.

It’s weird that I came across this via my Flickr contacts this morning, while writing a proposal for a paper I hope to give at MIT5 on Flickr, social aesthetics, and the reconfiguration of the relations between everyday life, ‘professional’ photography and artworlds.

Please observe my protruding right cheek here, but…

To play with Henry Jenkins’classic terminology for fandom, this latest Flickr fad is textual poaching in reverse because instead of pilfering the materials for creativity from the landlord, it’s all about sneaking your own creations into the master’s house. But it’s still a form of fandom in my view.

And I love the fact that a large number of the images in the biggest frames are utterly paradigmatic of vernacular photography: photos of babies, garden gnomes, cats and dogs. The effect is so much wittier than in the ones where people have used their best ‘arty’ photos. My dog wants to know when he’s going to be featured on a wall at MOMA.