Eye/Hand

Have you seen the "Eye/Hand" Flickr feed? This is my favorite, and by that I mean my first and only favorite Flickr feed. I just haven't been that in to Flickr. Blah blah blah. Pictures of people you met at parties who didn't know your geeky ass was gonna spray them all over the internet. Hang up the phone!

But Eye/Hand is special. This feed has a simple barrier of entry. You take a picture of yourself, and you draw it. Judging by the entries so far, it doesn't matter if you draw it on paper and scan it, or draw it in a computer program, it just has to be a hand-done thing.

Most of these are really awesome. I am accumulating all kinds of social speculation about society based on these drawings. For instance, women tend to draw themselves fatter than they really are. Men tend to draw themselves more angular, and perhaps even as distorted caricatures, than they really are.

What I really don't dig are the ones that come up and it's so clear that somebody traced it, I'm like "fuck that! you traced it!" Sure, art is art. Blah blah blah. But if you traced it, it looks so much like the original that it's no fun. It's like when you see Belle and Sebastian perform, and it sounds just like the record. No fun! So I really grimace when I see the loser "perfection" drawings show up. But I really grin when I see the wacky disproportionate "true players" images show up. If this is what Flickr is all about, then Flickr is all right.