Art/Image Sharing Communities

Since I am looking at the way art is made online, with Radhika’s suggestion, I decided to go back to the site I first used to share and view art online: deviantart.com. Surprisingly, my account still exists—frozen in time. I will share it with all of you, though it is a little bit embarrassing. (Keep in mind that 100% of this art was made by a teenager.) My deviantart account. At the time, I used the site primarily to curate my work. The secondary function was quasi-social. I have a lot of correspondence logged with other artists that took the form of both messaging and commenting.

Though I haven’t used the site in years, it seems to be doing well. The ratio of digital to “traditional” art seems to have increased dramatically. Most of the artists I know are no longer active on deviantart and have moved over to Flickr, or sites with more user-customization, such as Tumblr or their own domains.

Still, there is a great deal of art being produced and shared on deviantart. Much of the art there would not be considered “high” or “fine” art, either because of its content, technique, medium, or creator. The bulk of the art produced and curated by deviantart is not concerned with the elite art world, which is refreshing. Instead, it often features art that is functional—that is to say useful in another forum, or in service of an additional interest. For instance, there is a huge amount of fan art, avatars, icons, commissioned renderings of characters, and tutorials (see figure below).

Since my deviantart days, I have been involved with a site called dump.fm. The site was initially made as an art project by a couple of net-artists, but has become a vehicle for expression and socialization. Basically, the artists envisioned a version of the chatroom without words, where people could use images to communicate (basically a slightly higher-brow version of image boards like 4chan). Given the superabundance of images online, this was a huge success. Through dump.fm, the very private act of browsing the Internet can be shared and curated in real-time. It also brought together people who were interested in new media art.

Below is a little gif that I made from screenshots of dump.fm tonight:

The aesthetic of community tends toward nostalgic use of old-internet imagery and mediums. Clunky 3D animation, animated gifs, glitter graphics, stock images, and clip art are perennial favorites. Users also try to make clever combination of various found images and animations, sometimes incorporating the posts of other users to create some sort of dialogue. Like deviantart, dump.fm is a quasi-social site that allows users to post and aggregate images. Unlike deviantart, dump.fm is also part of the creative process, by allowing users to create images/posts within the site.

Interestingly the infamous image-board, 4chan, launched a site that is similar to dump.fm. The site, canv.as focuses less on the production of art, or the curation of images by people who are artsy, and more on streamlining the image-making process. On this site, users may upload and edit images within the window, and may also alter others' images. This allows for rapid meme creation and sharing. 

This is a gif I made of the progression of one image that was uploaded by a user:

So this is just a brief introduction to some of the art-making communities I've been a part of online. If I end up going for an ethnographic account of any of these, hopefully this will be of use!