With the advent of digital cameras and associated mainstream online forums such as flickr and youtube, the modernist impulse to create art for art’s sake has given way to a sort of user-generated white noise, where one’s ability to stream content without restraint merges with another’s unrestrained need to stream content, leaving little room for individual distinction.  Like names in a phone book that point to an ocean of individuals who have little relevancy in one’s day to day life, streaming art for an online public tends to exist with little context and as result, flounders in a kind of atomized digital anonymity.

Artificial Scarcity is Ripple’s attempt to rescue three years worth of art photography from the digital abyss by pulling a publicity stunt of sorts, highlighting the role that the audience/institution/collector plays in determining the worth of artistic output.

Ripple will exhibit an installation that includes a documentary video of a process-oriented work where he distributes 5x7 prints of all the images from his flickr stream throughout Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Berlin, Los Angeles, and New York and moves all the digital copies of the photos onto disc, puts the discs into a padded mailer, deletes the image files from his flickr account and his hard drive, tosses the padded envelope from the window of a moving car and sets back out to find the padded envelope that contains the discs the first weekend in December.  If the discs are found, you better believe they’re for sale.  If they’re not found, the 5x7 prints and a few blog site copies of the images will be all that remain of the work.

www.seanripple.net
www.incurve.blogspot.com
www.youtube.com/rippleflatlife