Thereās a wonderfully/frustratingly/surprisingly/amazing small group of people who use drawing machines, make videos, and make videos about drawing machines, meaning itās always a delight to see a new video pop up on YouTube, hereās Kellyā¦
ā¦so of courseā¦
ā¦TheAdrift to the rescueā¦
All that aside, the fun thing here is that Kelly has been doing Riso printing for years and recently decided to add a drawing machine as another tool in her creative arsenal.
Meanwhile Iāve gone on the other direction of using drawing machines for years and recently added a Riso machine š
You can find out more about Kelly over on her Patreon
Speaking of Riso, thereās also Sarah Ridgley, ā āMedia artist using JavaScript + Risograph to build systems that explore digital gesture and physical print.ā ā who Iām pretty sure most of you already follow, but if you donāt you should: https://www.instagram.com/sarahridgley/
(āļø Code + Riso Printing, 24 frames - Sarah Ridgley āļø)
So weāve got generative art, design, riso print, code, and drawing machines (and we really need to throw letterpress and field recordings into that mix too) ā I wonder what SN-sz7kw would make of it all!
# FLICKR FOUNDATION
I wanted to drop in a quick mention about my actual day job. Just over 20 years ago I worked for and helped build the photo sharing website flickr.com, the place where people put all their photos before Instagram and Facebook.
Now, many years later Iām working for the Flickr Foundation.
The 501(c)(3) Flickr Foundation exists to keep Flickr pictures visible for 100 years, preserving our shared visual commons for future generations.
Flickr has grown into one of the biggest photo collections on Earth. It contains tens of billions of images from people all over the world, and keeps growing every day.
Thatās why weāve created the Flickr Foundationāan independent, community-focused organization. Weāre committed to stewarding this cultural treasure for future generations, and fostering a visual commons we can all enjoy.
Thereās not many times you get a chance to circle back to something and somewhere you enjoyed working on and with two decades later, so of course I had to jump at the chance.
One of the thought experiments or design fictions weāre working with is āWhat if Flickr vanished?ā - which puts me in the somewhat weird, and again semi-fictional position of being having been a midwife for photo collections back then, and conceptually a death doula for them now š¤
I could go on to try and explain or describe more, but, if youāre in any way interested in photography, documentary, archiving and preservation thereās a bunch of good stuff over on our blog: https://www.flickr.org/blog/ which does a much better job.
Here are some good ones to jump into to give you a taste, I mean just the titles are probably enough to get the gist.
āBorn-Digital Collections, Archives & Memoryā Reflections
Future Memories Symposium: How Photography Shapes Our Understanding of the World
The Ghost Stays in the Picture, Part 1: Archives, Datasets, and Infrastructures
Of course weāre blessed with living in āinteresting timesā where documenting and preserving both personal and national archives is⦠challenging, so you know my job is āfunā!
# A RISO ZINE, BECAUSE OF COURSE
One of the blog posts āThe Forgetful Web: A Case for Reflective Archivingā by Jill Blackmore Evans, caught my eye.
George is off to the yearly Flickr team retreat thing and we figured taking some āswagā would be good; as a team weād been thinking about what fliers, posters, postcards and such could be given to people, and I was itching to try to make a zine on the Riso printer.
With a very rusty memory of flowing text from one box to another in InDesign, I copy and pasted the blog post in and took it from there.
This was very much a ācan this be done (by me)?ā experiment, with the answers being yes, yes, and a big list of things to do better next time.
# WEB 2.0 to WEB 3.0
Substack tells me, once more, that this email is at its limit, because this week Iāve chosen many images over words š so hereās my quick observation.
I had the pleasure of working on Flickr when āWeb 2.0ā was properly kicking off, all about APIs and different platforms talking to each other, and how lovely it was to share.
And now Iām at the āhow do we keep a permanent ledger of things to help preserve records?ā stage. Answers on a postcard please to the usual address, especially when the answer isnāt āuse IPFSā (unless it actually is).
# THE END
Last newsletter I said āthere is a very slim chance by the next newsletter (24th June btw) that the first introduction module will have been uploaded to YouTube, about 11 videos in allā - about the pen plotter tutorials I was recording.
Well, Iāve got six out of those 11 recorded and edited, so progressā¢ļø.
I think Iāve now decided itās some kind of sport to try and guess what Iāll be writing about in the next newsletter, but also if I say it, perhaps itāll become true; manifesting and intentions and all that š So this time letās say in next newsletter (10th July) weāll have more tutorial videos done, and some FALLiNGWATER riso prints and notebooks made.
Love you all
Dan
ā¤ļø
This weekās musicā¦
Great newsletter and fine choice of music.
That zine is stunning! It is available for purchase?