Welcome, Dan Catt!
Well hi! I’ve joined the Flickr Foundation team, and here I am writing my introduction blog post because George is making me.
I’m Dan Catt, and I’d much rather be taking photos, editing videos, getting absolutely covered in ink, making robots draw with fountain pens, and most importantly, being elbow-deep in writing code than writing about myself (more on that later). I don’t drink tea or coffee, I’m trying to give up caffeine, and I’ve already ditched sugar. It’s excellent, and I really recommend it. And yes, I like cats, but we currently don’t have one; we’re waiting for all three kids to leave home before we replace them with a cat, one down, two to go. No dogs, sorry.
It’s always been about the story, the beginning, the middle and the end. This particular story started around 20 years ago when I joined the Flickr team, small, scrappy, Web 2.0, “The Open Web” and all that. An exciting time in social media, sharing photos and tiny, short, badly compressed videos. Back then, George wasn’t asking me to write blog posts. Instead, we worked together on a range of Flickr things, including one of my favourites, the Places project. People, places, photos, maps, tags, pulling them all together, helping to wrap some kind of context around the photos, in locations, in time, teasing out the threads and stories that linked them.
Between Flickr dot com then and Flickr dot org now, I’ve been working as an artist in my studio in Shrewsbury, UK. This is where I’ve been developing my arts-based research into AI’s role in documenting and archiving a living art practice. This includes a form of digital journaling backed by an AI (called Kitty), which also has access to my encoded handwriting, fountain pens, paper journal, and various bits of hardware around the studio. In short, while I love documenting processes, I’m not very keen on all the writing parts, thus the desire to get computers armed with fountain pens to do it for me.
Which brings us to the middle.
The Flickr Foundation’s purpose is to develop an accessible social and technical infrastructure to protect the amazing archive that’s building up on Flickr and ensure that it is sustained far into the future for the generation and beyond. How do we preserve photographic collections for the next 100 years?
How do we preserve and archive the progress, ideas, and strategies we decided on (and those we rejected, and why) along the way? How does any organisation?
I’m very excited to join the team (as co-technical lead, along with the amazing Alex) to explore these questions (yay, future stuff) and continue to develop the awesome work already in progress (yay, current stuff). I couldn’t be happier! Well, I mean, I could also have a cat and less caffeine withdrawal headache, but I’ll take working with a fantastic team, even if one of them does make me write blog posts!
The end.
Well, we haven’t gotten there yet, and I’m happy to stay in the middle of this story for a while longer. Besides, with a 100-year plan, the end of this particular project will outlive me by many years. So, for the moment, I’m focusing on telling this part of the story, mainly with photos and videos and, for most of it, elbow-deep in code.