Odilexcess

Jeremy Sloan

It seems to me that something new is happening here on Flickr, on DeviantArt, and on several other sites -- something that, as far as I've observed, hasn't happened before. Ever. I don't say that lightly.

What I see happening is artistic collaboration. That, in itself, is nothing new. We've been making art collaboratively, I suspect, since we've been painting the walls of caves.

What's new is the massive scale and amazing speed of the process – the idea that a group of individuals, as geographically disparate as possible and bound only by a common set of interests, can set the ground rules of a creative project, start working independently, share and discuss their initial contributions, react to, and begin to build upon one another’s ideas in a matter of days, or even hours. Pardon my French, but that's pretty fucking cool.

It's the idea that a tongue-in-cheek remark about a tin of Pringles made in Columbus, OH, can spark two dozen wildly different but conceptually linked photos in the course of a week – submitted from as far away as Australia and immediately available to the entire group of participants. That's new, and it's our gigantic little open secret.