Penelope Umbrico rocks

I read about Penelope Umbrico’s awesome project “Suns from the Internet” at the weekend – because it’s on at the Natman Room, BAM Peter Jay Sharp Buildinguntil March 14th.

It’s so cool, like a lot of her work. I’m thinking of doing something similar – an homage – for the wall of our office.

This is a project I started when I found 541,795 pictures of sunsets searching the word “sunset” on the image hosting website, Flickr. I cropped just the suns from these pictures and uploaded them to Kodak, making 4″ x 6″ machine prints from them.

For each installation, the title reflects the number of hits I got searching “sunset” on Flickr on the day I made/print the piece – for example, the title of the piece for the Gallery of Modern Art, Australia, was “2,303,057 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 9/25/07” and for the New York Photo Festival it was “3,221,717 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 3/31/08″ – the title itself becoming a comment on the ever increasing use of web-based photo communities, and a reflection of the ubiquity of pre-scripted collective content there.

The same project also contains a piece called 15 Copyrighted Suns From the Internet. Compare and contrast: