Some News
Announcing a new creative research project with the Flickr Foundation
A rare midweek post to share some exciting news: I’ve been named a 2024 Research Fellow with the Flickr Foundation! The Flickr Foundation is a non-profit organization tasked with “keeping Flickr pictures visible for 100 years,” preserving the shared visual commons for future generations.
From the post, linked below:
As the tech industry continues building new infrastructures on this training data, our window of opportunity for deciding what we give away to these machines is closing, and understanding what is in those datasets is difficult, if not impossible. Much of the training data is proprietary, or has been taken offline. While we cannot map generated images to their true training data, massive online archives like Flickr give us insight into what they might be. Through my work with the Flickr Foundation, I’ll look at the images from institutions and users to think about what these images mean in this generated era.
You can read about my research project, which will explore AI-generated images and Flickr’s archives as a source of training data, looking for ways to enter the archive through the images it generates. Along the way I am eager to tackle the project’s cultural questions about memory, datafication, and AI’s role in the history of the image.
You’ll find more about the project at the blog post I’ve written for the Foundation by clicking the button.
London Folks, Beware!
As part of the fellowship, I’ll be doing a one month residency in London in April 2024: IE, about three weeks from now!
If you’re around, let me know. I’d be very interested in meeting up with folks, and I’m open to talks or presentations about my work. Feel free to reach out.
Cool!
Congrats, Eryk!