Artist Condemns 'Image Overload' by Printing 24 Hours Worth of Flickr Photos

In an effort to highlight wasteful sharing on the Internet, artist Erik Kessels printed off a full day's worth of images uploaded on Flickr, a popular photosharing website. He then piled high his anti-waste message into several rooms -- there's enough there to bury yourself in.

So, while I agree that there is wasteful, pointless sharing on the Internet, at least it's digital waste. Kessels printed off more than 1 million physical copies of this waste and created good, old-fashioned paper waste.

GeekOSystem has this comment:

Humbling, and certainly thought provoking, Kessel’s work challenges the notion that everything can and should be shared, which has become fundamental to the modern web. Then again, perhaps it’s only wasteful and overwhelming when you print all the pictures and divorce them from their original context.

Kessels, according to Creative Review, apparently recognizes his own wastefulness but felt it was still more important to prove a point:

“We’re exposed to an overload of images nowadays,” says Kessels. “This glut is in large part the result of image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook, and picture-based search engines. Their content mingles public and private, with the very personal being openly and un-selfconsciously displayed. By printing all the images uploaded in a 24-hour period, I visualise the feeling of drowning in representations of other peoples’ experiences.”

Kessels' work is the newest installation at Amsterdam's Foam gallery titled "Photography in Abundance".