An evening of experimental works and conversations by BA (Hons) Fine Art: Computational Arts and the Flickr Foundation. Featuring works by Maisy Charlton, Xach Hill, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, Yunzhi Li, Lyra Robinson, Nikos Antonio Kourous Vázquez, Rizq Yazed, Jack Jessé and Triss Qian, and Panayotis Zapantis.

Flickr is an online photo sharing platform and community founded in 2004, but its history is rooted in Game Neverending, a web-based multiplayer online game developed by Ludicorp, a company founded by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. Game Neverending was a social game that focused on user interaction, and while it never gained commercial success, the image-sharing tools developed for it laid the groundwork for the launch of Flickr. 

Flickr quickly gained popularity for its social networking features and the ability to tag photos with metadata. Eventually this led to the creation a vast network of searchable images. Now there are tens of billions of images that have been uploaded to the platform and more are being added every day. Flickr introduced several technological innovations that have significantly impacted the way people interact with photos online, many of which have now become standard features across social media. For example, tagging, which allows users to add descriptive keywords to their photos; photo pools and groups, which enables users to create and join communities around shared interests and themes; and geotagging, which allows users to add location data to their photos. 

Flickr’s biggest innovation was offering API access, and it was perhaps the first photosharing platform to do so. This allowed developers to build applications and services that could interact with Flickr data and encouraged innovation and integration with other services and platforms. 

Flickr came close to annihilation in 2017, when its then owner, Verizon, wanted to destroy billions of photos as it was deemed too expensive to sell. Luckily, Flickr was eventually sold to SmugMug and the collection was preserved. This near-death experience led George Oates to create the Flickr Foundation in 2022, with the mission of preserving this collection as a resource for 100 years.

Taking the community and technological histories of Flickr as a starting point, artists currently studying on the BA Fine Art: Computational Arts course at Camberwell College of Art have created artworks that explore and play with Flickr’s image collections. The work by students showcases a range of computational and photographic practices, from interactive projects that use the Flickr API, to playfully collaging and recontextualising photographs, to short films that question the absurdity, shared experiences, and vernaculars of digital image sharing.

Featuring works by Maisy Charlton, Xach Hill, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, Yunzhi Li, Lyra Robinson, Nikos Antonio Kourous Vázquez, Rizq Yazed, Jack Jessé and Triss Qian, and Panayotis Zapantis.

Friday evenings at The Photographers' Gallery are free to enter. Visitors also have access to our current exhibitions, Planetary Portals: I am in your dreams but you are not in mine; Deutsche Börse Foundation Photography Prize 2025, and Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever.