Image Aesthetics at Scale: Web 2.0, Flickr and its legacy

Wed 09 Dec 2020 - Wed 09 Dec 2020

 
Sunset Portraits from Sunset Pictures on Flickr, 2010 - ongoing. Penelope Umbrico

Image Aesthetics at Scale: Web 2.0, Flickr and its legacy

Wed 09 Dec 2020 - Wed 09 Dec 2020

 

This event is part of our Past Programme

Explore Past Programme
In 2004 the pioneering photo-sharing website Flickr was born, and by 2011 it was host to over 6 billion images. Flickr quickly became a case study in digital visual surplus; its millions of users unleashed a networked photographic tsunami which – over sixteen years later – we continue to be disoriented by. 
 

In this event we will consider the legacy of Flickr with Markus Spiering and Bhautik Joshi, who have shaped visual culture through their work at leading technology companies including Flickr, Adobe, EyeEm and Industrial Light and Magic. Grounded in the practices of technologists and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the discussion will explore the ’social’ life of images as the technical infrastructures which sustain them. Crucially, we will explore the implications of computer scientists as increasingly significant ‘curators’ of photographic culture. How are companies approaching the task of surfacing beautiful photography at scale to a community of users? How is machine vision and metadata mobilised towards forms of algorithmic connoisseurship?  What can we learn from Flickr about classification, filtering, auto-tagging, copyright and the pressure to monetise content? 

This event forms part of Curating Ubiquity: Photographic value after the Internet, a programme of events organised by Katrina Sluis, Gaia Tedone and Nicolas Malevé supported by the SNSF funded research project Curating Photography in the Networked Image Economy.

Markus Spiering was Flickr’s Head of Product and managed the global product direction and product management team of Yahoo!'s photo-sharing service from 2011-2014. He subsequently joined the mobile photography platform EyeEm as its Chief Product Officer. Under his leadership the company transformed from a Berlin-based startup to a company with a world-class product and design and achieved global footprint. He later served as Vice President of Product and Design at Udacity, before joining Adobe in 2019 where he is presently Product Director of Adobe’s Creative Cloud, based in San Francisco. In 2013 Markus was named as one of Silicon Valley's top 40 under 40 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal.


Bhautik Joshi occupied the post of Data Scientist & Back-end Team Lead at Flickr from 2013-2016, applying his expertise in big data, camera construction and image processing to develop the platform’s computational infrastructure. Prior to this, he worked as a research engineer at DigitalFish, Industrial Light and Magic and Rising Sun Pictures working in post-production. He is presently Senior Research Engineer at Adobe, with a focus on 3D and immersive media working with artists to create tools that solve pain points in content creation.