As per our New Media assignment, I put a selection of my photo-based artwork on Flikr a few weeks ago. Doing so has changed my experience and understanding of them, but not via public engagement or participation. Although 1 or 2 people have left comments, which was nice, in general, I realize that just putting work online doesn’t necessarily attract any attention without some kind of promotion.

I also realized that the nature of these images, which had previously been “personal”, and whose presentation had previously been largely controlled by me in terms of their scale, lighting, sequenceing, etc., was suddenly completely beyond my control. I realized that anyone could use, change or claim them, and that I wouldn’t know about it. I also realized that their appearance and size would be different on different monitors, and would not ever approach the kind of experience intended in the gallery setting, where some images were shown in human scale, at 8×12′, and 8×8′.

In particular, the 8×8′ image changed a lot in the gallery space, appearing as a huge, crisp image as you entered the gallery. The figures of 3 children appeared life-sized, and the image became quite three-dimensional, since you (the viewer) became the fourth person in the image as part of it’s projected experiential space.

As you moved through the gallery towards the image, you became more and more a part of it, until it began to break down into an abstract kind of pointillism at about 3 feet away.

All of this is entirely lost online.

This loss of control is somewhat disturbing. On the other hand, the opportunity for a wider audience is interesting. Using meta-tags or adding links to other sites may have drawn more viewers, and more feedback, which might have offset the feeling of loss-of-control.

The other issue, also connected to loss of control, was noted in reading Flikr’s fine print. They assert their right to anything uploaded to their site. Even if you remove it from the site, they make you acknowledge their right to back up the site and to use these back-ups if they wish.

While I guess anything you put online is vulnerable to this, it’s a good reason to consider carefully what you want to make available or not.