Neil Banas: rain-penlike-smallbasins-full (section) / Jim Soliven: HTorsion

Flickr surfing is no longer a waste of time. Beautiful works like Neil Banas’ rain-penlike-smallbasins-full or Jim Soliven’s HTorsion make even idle searching worthwhile. Both can be found in the Processing Pool, which has a generally high level of quality. For more excellent examples, see Paul Prudence "Flickr fruits" on Dataisnature.

Despite its bias towards photography, Flickr is rapidly becoming one of the most important resources for generative artists. Its image storage facilities are of obvious use in any art practice, but it’s the social infrastructure that makes it a killer app for artists. In seconds an image can be uploaded and shared with a larger community that can give feedback on the work, while image pools makes it easy to see work by other artists and make new contact.

Flickr can’t replace personal web sites or blogs for in-depth information, but it allows for a sense of immediacy and interaction that those channels lack. While portfolio sites generally show only finished work, Flickr makes it easy to publish work-in-progress and rough sketches that would otherwise never be published.

Sadly, Flickr policy dictates that non-photographic images are not the focus of the service, with some resulting weirdness and frustration. But that still hasn’t stopped artists like Joshua Davis, Golan Levin and Lia from publishing excellent documentation of their work that is far more comprehensive than their personal web sites could ever be.

Caveat emptor: Like any commercial service, Flickr is not a democracy. Nor is it perfect. The dreaded NIPSA (Not In Public Site Areas) policy and the new content filters that have replaced it has made life on Flickr a little pleasant than it used to be. Some people might be more comfortable with alternatives like ComputerLove or deviantART…

Recommended starting points for generative art on Flickr

• Processing pool
• VVVV pool
• Jitter pool
• Generator.x pool
• Generative & Evolutionary Art pool (Warning: Varying quality…)