From December 2010 to January 2011, Brooklyn-based artist David Horvitz drove up the West Coast from Mexico to Oregon, stopping to take pictures of himself staring off into various vistas as a part of his latest project, Public Access. Horvitz took each of his images — a collection of pensively photobombed beaches, bridges, lighthouses, and creeks — and uploaded them to their proper Wikipedia pages, adding to and sometimes replacing the images already there.
Unsurprisingly, the geek overlords at Wikipedia were more than a little bit confused by the images of the mystery man that were sprouting up on the Wikipedia pages for most West Coast landmarks. After the jump, check out some of Horvitz’s photos juxtaposed with some of our favorite publicly documented Wikipedia editor conversations debating whether the images should stay or go. Who knew so many of them moonlighted as art critics!
“Without intending to be insulting to the uploader, File:26 pelican.JPG is one of a series of not very good images of a man on a beach and I would not use it to illustrate any subject.”
— Delicious carbuncle (talk) 01:51, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
“removing poorly placed, under-exposed image” (undo)
— Eeekster (talk | contribs) 05:32, 20 January 2011 (13,457 bytes)
“Crap photo of dubious sourcing.” (TW)) (undo)
— Ryulong (talk | contribs) 03:22, 23 January 2011 (12,166 bytes)
“another sockpuppet inserting poor images” (undo)
— Eeekster (talk | contribs) 05:39, 20 January 2011 (25,333 bytes)
“To me, the biggest issue is the saturation-bombing of one person’s appearance in a large number of articles. The middling quality of the images is also an issue, but it is a much smaller one [...] I’ve been replacing these with cropped versions where it’s possible to crop them and still have a useful image, and removing the others, because we don’t need to be supporting this .. .whatever it is. If anyone legitimately prefers the images with the one guy in them, feel free to revert me, but I don’t feel a need to have this guy in every Southern California article.”
— Gavia immer (talk) 02:53, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
“Actually, it can be very good to have a person in these kinds of images, in order to show the scale of the features. In these cases, I don’t think we should care who that person is.”
— OrangeDog 00:13, 16 January 2011 (UTC)
“It isn’t necessarily in bad faith [...] It should be purely a matter of whether the photo is informative or if the figure detracts from it, and if you can’t tell from a single photo whether it’s incidental or vanity, then unless you’re going to put more than one in the same article it probably doesn’t matter.”
— postdlf (talk) 03:26, 16 January 2011 (UTC)
“Suggest we keep an eye out for any instances of the image being added; maybe someone can put something into an edit filter? The key question is whether this chap is out to help the encyclopaedia; I don’t think he is: he’s here to display his artwork to as many people as possible.”
— Chase me ladies, I’m the Cavalry (talk) 22:13, 22 January 2011 (UTC)
Most of the images have been removed from the live Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons pages, but you can download the artist-distributed PDF with all of the Public Access photos and archived Wikipedia editor comments here.
Comments (16)
Love it! Reminds me of Antony Gormley cast sculpture figures facing the sea, and Casper David Friedrich painting “Wanderer above a sea of fog”; it’s just what Wiki needs, a sense of contemplation…
i love wikipedia but/and agree with the displayed comments
really? banal stuff. Nice “artists” stunt to bomb Wikipedia.
stupid but funny
“art critics”? it’s actually pretty tame and legitimate analysis of whether the images are reasonable canonnical examples of the place.
agree with the editors:
- it is not appropriate to include a single figure in a landscape unless the figure is there to provide scale. (tho *many* people, illustrating a popular place, would be acceptable.)
- they are generally quite poor photos, almost as if he took borderline-quality pictures just to skirt reasonableness and push people’s buttons
if this stunt is “art” from Brooklyn these days, I’m sad for Brooklyn.
When did “conquer” come to mean the same thing as “fail”?
Mediocre photos were placed on a website that anyone can edit, and only some of them were kept. This is considered conquering? I guess if you set your goals really really low, you’ll never cease to amaze yourself.
[...] Photobombing Wikipedia. (thx, Elisa) [...]
Eh, Wikipedia admins (and Commons admins) deleted it :P.
[...] [via Flavorwire] [...]
Um, everything worked the way it was supposed to and your pictures got deleted because they weren’t very good.
It’s funny for a couple of seconds and then just annoying. As art goes, it’s pretty darn lame.
[...] to make sense of what was going on. Flavorpill has compiled a list of their favorite comments here, or you can take a look at the projects more detailed PDF here. Share or Bookmark [...]
the only thing that’s triumphant about this is how so many different editors found so many different, reasonable ways to agree that this guy sucks. “wikipedia conquers artist, one image at a time” is a much more realistic title.
Why would anyone expect anything substantial from Wikipedia’s 85% male constituency?
As art, it is ingenious. Horvitz has used the photograph itself as a marking substance and applied it to the medium of the digital world. A sort of web graffiti. And like graffiti on the street, most of it is painted over with aggression.
Horvitz’ “piece” was successful in that he acted as the pointing finger. What he’s pointing to is up to our level awareness to decide.
Having pedestrian responses to such things, automatic disregard for unknown others says more about us than it does about the unknown other.
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