Pace/MacGill Gallery and the School of VISUAL ARTS, MFA Photography, Video & Related Media presented "selfportraitr," an interactive exhibition in 2006 of self-portraits drawn from Flickr.com, the online digital photo-sharing network. Flickr's user base consists of over one million members who share images and image-related information. Two leading forces in the New York art world--a major photography gallery and a top art school--have joined together to observe this online coversation of image making. The mining and showcasing of this material strives to engage and expand a rapidly growing virtual arts community. The exhibition is accessible to both viewers and contributors alike via the Pace/MacGill website. For the exhibition, Pace/MacGill's gallery space housed ten computers on which visits could peruse the pictures gathered from numerous global photographers as they would online. A few monitors also displayed slideshows of images specifically collected via the gallery website.
The work in the exhibition will perpetually expand with the proliferation of users until the popularity of each category aids in its editing. As more images are collected and more users are interacting with the site to make selections, the work will become more discerning and interesting. One can choose the role they wish to assume: curator, artist, etcetera. With every click of the mouse, viewers become participants; the interactive community defines the exhbition.
The exhibition was assembed by Pace/MacGill Gallery, Jeremy Chien (class of 2001), and Stephen Jablonsky (faculty & class of 1995). UK Web developer Kelvin Luck programmed the exhibition software to search, filter and explore Flickr.com.