Comments on: collaborative images

collaborative images

jeremias — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 05:19:34 -0800

Fellow automatically combines 50 Flickr images with the same tag into a single image. So who owns the copyright? Heh.

By: Ynoxas

Ynoxas — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 05:28:45 -0800

Wow.

By: rcade

rcade — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 05:53:19 -0800

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.

By: GooseOnTheLoose

GooseOnTheLoose — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 05:55:05 -0800

Brilliant.

By: OffTopic

OffTopic — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 06:14:42 -0800

I don't get it. They all just look like big smudges. Meh.

By: dabitch

dabitch — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 06:20:52 -0800

Heh.. Reminds me a little of the "every Playboy centerfold" C-prints.

By: sninky-chan

sninky-chan — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 06:31:59 -0800

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.

By: moonbird

moonbird — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 06:47:02 -0800

some of these are really gorgeous... thanks!

By: fire&wings

fire&wings — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 07:07:28 -0800

They remind me of Vincent Gallo's mediocre paintings. Only better.

By: alms

alms — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 07:21:14 -0800

Beautiful. They remind me of paintings by Rebecca Purdum, which last told were selling for about $18,000 each.

By: Ynoxas

Ynoxas — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 07:50:14 -0800

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.

By: Ynoxas

Ynoxas — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 07:51:02 -0800

clarification: of course I mean prints or reproductions, not the originals, I'm no art collector, I just like cool things.

By: mmahaffie

mmahaffie — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 07:59:16 -0800

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.

By: blacklite

blacklite — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 08:22:46 -0800

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.

By: monju_bosatsu

monju_bosatsu — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 09:00:57 -0800

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.

By: dabitch

dabitch — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 09:13:15 -0800

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.

By: sgt.serenity

sgt.serenity — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 10:27:50 -0800

Interesting idea , maybe less than 50 images would be better though.

By: mendel

mendel — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 10:30:47 -0800

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.

By: Satapher

Satapher — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 10:38:05 -0800

rothko! looks awesome

By: fenriq

fenriq — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 11:22:21 -0800

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.

By: kingfisher, his musclebound cat

kingfisher, his musclebound cat — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 12:26:17 -0800

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.

By: hypnorich

hypnorich — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 12:26:47 -0800

i'd love to see it animated. from 1 to 100

By: odinsdream

odinsdream — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 12:42:39 -0800

Isn't there some legalese that says if a work cannot be reasonably shown to be based on any particular copyrighted work, then it is not a derivative of any particular work? Obviously these blendings are derivatives of exactly 50 other works, but what's important is that it cannot be reasonably shown which 50 works it comes from. So, if the question is, "Is this copyright infringement?" the answer, as far as I can tell, would be "Infringement on whose copyright?"

By: shortfuse

shortfuse — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 13:06:47 -0800

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".

By: kingfisher, his musclebound cat

kingfisher, his musclebound cat — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 14:36:09 -0800

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.

By: shortfuse

shortfuse — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 15:16:37 -0800

Ha ha. Nicely done.

By: casu marzu

casu marzu — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 16:32:56 -0800

brevity appears to be a MeFite. A very quiet one, at that. [this is good]

By: BoringPostcards

BoringPostcards — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 19:29:09 -0800

Those are beautiful.

By: shoepal

shoepal — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 22:44:53 -0800

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.

By: rcade

rcade — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 05:58:07 -0800

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.

By: Enron Hubbard

Enron Hubbard — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 08:07:57 -0800

Did anyone else experience a Rorschach-like quality while viewing these? Or is that just the drugs kicking in?