(You're the only person who has used "databending" as a tag.)

spurred in part by paul's recent post, i've finally gotten around to signing up with flickr. i have tentative plans to start doing more visual databending in the near future, and when i do, i plan to post the bent photos to flickr rather than host them here (and go through all the hand-coding necessary to create those nice bent galleries).

moreover, i hope to take advantage of the creative commons content on flickr for this new wave of bending, taking CC-licensed photos from flickr, creating derivative works (bends) of them, and posting those back on flickr. think of it as a way of rewarding people for posting their photos with a CC license. perhaps some of the people whose photos i bend won't like what i've done, but i'm hoping some will get a kick out of it. after all, the point of a CC license is allowing others to use your work, so what better reward than to have others use your work? i get free content, with no concerns of being sued, and they get the joy of having people remix their stuff in cool ways.

i won't get around to this project right away. i have paying work to do. (the current plan is to do my first new batch of bending in september.) so for the time being, i had to upload something, and i thought it was fitting for my first uploads to be from the final edition of friday cat bending: cat bending #8: in memoriam. (see the flickr set.)

after uploading, i went about adding tags, ensuring they all had CC licenses, etc. as i was playing with the tags, i clicked one of my "databending" tags and was treated to this disappointing message: (You're the only person who has used "databending" as a tag.) i got the same result for databent.

it's not that there isn't databent stuff on flickr. there is. lots of it. sometimes flickr itself creates the bends. hell, there are whole photo pools devoted to glitch art. (in other words, i should've started uploading my shiz there months ago.) but the term databending has never been used there before.

i really like the term. i didn't coin it (i assume whoever started the databenders list coined it, but i have no idea), but i've been using it for years, and everyone in my circle uses it. so i was surprised that nobody on flickr had ever used the tag before. had nobody else from the databenders list joined flickr? is the term passé, replaced by "glitch art" in the same way that "alternative rock" became "indie rock"?

(technically—allow me to geek out here for a moment—databending is more broad than glitch art. glitch art is a type of visual art. databending can be done in any medium; the term is most often used to refer to audio work. or more precisely, we could say that databending is a process that can be used to create glitch art, glitch music, and other forms of glitchy/bent media. [not all glitch art is databent, either.] maybe someday i'll write up definitions of databending and glitch art for wikipedia, but not tonight.)

now that i'm on flickr, i hope to spread the word there (literally, i hope to spread the word "databending", though i'd like to spread its ideals as well). maybe i can even get some other benders to sign up (syntax? anyone?) and post their own works.

but maybe i'm the one who needs to get with the times, ditch the D-word, and start proclaiming the wonders of "glitch art".¶