Charting The Infinite Waters Of The Internet, One Family Photo At A Time

Niko Princen, Trapezium. 2009

Back in the day, you would go to a Sunday flea market to collect old photographs. Now, they’re found on Flickr.

Niko Princen, a Berlin-based Dutch artist who gathers vacation photos from Flickr, has created a series of books showcasing people on holidays before natural disasters strike or political unrest. See a couple smiling with martinis in Greece before the Eurozone crisis, or one traveler posing in Norway right before the Utøya shootings. In light of the Ukrainian revolution, his latest photo book, Ukraine 2014, showcases photos from Kiev.

Reappropriating other people’s holiday photos is normal in Princen’s world, who takes us back to a faux-historical utopia untouched by the news frenzy, the suffering, the truth. The artist is no stranger to waxing philosophical on the infinity of the internet (quick answer: infinite) and puts under view our relationship to computers, be it deep, meaningful or totally flippant.

In the past, he’s garnered clicks for St0ck1mages, an ever-changing site to give code a face, while his other project Infinite Line is a green line that has been growing pixels by the second since 2009. He also experiments with Skype calls, allowing his callers to blow out candles through a subwoofer on the other end of the line. Princen has also created videotapes of himself in everyday scenarios, like cleaning his computer screen.

As he gears up for a show this June in Switzerland for the Triennale d'art contemporain 2014 en Valais, he spoke to us about failing browsers and his own definition of online and offline.

Cleaning the Screen by Niko Princen

Creator’s Project: I heard about your piece using Flickr photos in places right before natural disasters strike. How did you decide on what images to use for Holidays? Was there a recurring theme in the pre-disaster Flicker pics?
Niko Princen:The project Holidays consists of photos I took of my screen looking at photos people took during their holidays. The location was chosen after political unrest, natural disasters or human tragedies happened and at the time were the headlines of the news. In 2011, there was great unrest in Libya. So I went looking online for holiday photos of people who visited Libya close before the unrest began. The project started out as a Facebook project in reaction to other people's holiday photos. So, I created an album right after the 'disaster' happened. Later, for an exhibition, I decided to order them online in a format that you would normally use for your holiday or family photos and that's how the photo books came about.

They're all holiday photos, but some are more focused on the family, like Thailand 2011 or Greece 2011. Those countries are more of a tourist destination than for instance Syria 2011 where most I could find online were group visits to archaeological places.

The photos are in different albums on my Facebook page but there you can only see them bare. While if you see them in the books they are incorporated into the different standardized designs the downloadable program offered to create a book.

Ukraine 2014 photo book

The newest photo book Ukraine 2014 is about to come out. They are travel photos of someone visiting the cities Kharkov, Donetsk, and Kiev with apparently a love for trains and trams.

From 'Costa Concordia 2012', photo book

St0ck1mages gives algorhythms a face. Why do you use stock images and how does it work with the stock market?
For St0ck1mages, I combined the financial market data from Yahoo together with Google image search specified on faces. So when you pick one of the financial markets from the menu it gets a number through a Yahoo API. It does that every 1/10 of a second and then sends the current number to an image search. The first image that shows up is used in the ticker. When the number changes a new image of a face is shown in the ticker.

Most of the stock trades are nowadays done by faceless high frequency computer algorithms. What happened during the 2010 Flash Crash is beyond human comprehension. On the other hand, we measure the world around us to a human standard. Big and small or close and far. These things are all compared to one person at the center. With computers that center is shifting and that is very interesting to look at if possible.

When you did 10 Photoshop Brushes, were you trying to express the message about the general population’s knowledge on modern art? 
I was not thinking about that when I made it. Quite the opposite, maybe. The idea was to create a form of curation in a very specific format where you need tools to access it. In this case Photoshop. But it is also a way of distribution for creation. If you have a computer with Photoshop and you download the set of brushes you'll be able to create new images from the old. Creation is a continuous idea. To say an artwork is finished means that the total destruction is complete.

10 Photoshop Brushes

What is the response like for Blowing a Candle over Skype? Do you often try and make what's online, offline?
The responses to that project were very positive and different to each other. The whole exhibition had to with air, an invisible mixture with a touch. I guess because I used it in a basic way for communication between humans, people could see (or hear) different things in it. At the opening someone told me about the relation to Greek mythology while later I heard from another artist who exhibited at the same venue told me that his mother who I think is not very into contemporary art loved the 'Blowing' works the most in the series of exhibition at the venue Headquarters. I don't think there is a difference between online and offline. They're in the same streaming world inhabited by humans who like to communicate.

Scan of the balloons used in 'IN THE EVENT OF FIRE', digital print on balloons, 2012 at Headquarters, Zürich

Your works are dependent on other systems, how much of it is limited to the browser?
Some of my works are browser based works. Just recently after 13 000 0000 seconds (4+ years) the 'Infinite Line' stopped going on in Safari, which was the last browser to my knowledge to display it fully. The browser is our access to the Internet and I like to work with that phenomena. In 'Browsers and I' I take the turn myself to find the edge of a browser by manually stretching a browser until it crashes.

The systems we use now will change and that could make the works disappear. I make documentation of those works by taking screenshots or video.

Why does ‘behind the screen’ interest you?
Because somewhere else it happens or happened in front of a screen.

Laser Eye Selfies 2011 - ongoing, collection of online generated images.

Calendars, digital print, 2012 - ongoing

Fading Out the Artist, 2011, online. At 1000 views the opacity of the image was 0%

'Untitled', whiteboard that was part of 'Time and Images Again', 2012, Kunsthaus Langenthal.

Time and Images Again by Niko Princen

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