User:Alan Baring Brown/Horvitz

David Horvitz (1982 - ) is a Brooklyn-based photographer and performance artist, known for his often bizarre and absurdist DIY instructional projects, including work on Wikipedia. He was born in Los Angeles, California, and educated at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

241543903 project
On April 6, 2009, Horvitz posted a picture with his head in the freezer on his Flickr account. He said he got the idea after telling his friend Mylinh Nguyen to try sticking her head in a freezer to cure her sickness. He picked the number 241543903 (a combination of the serial number of his refrigerator and the barcodes on a bag of food he had bought).

He then posted the following instruction on Tumblr: "Take a photograph of your head inside a freezer. Upload this photo to the internet (like Flickr). Tag the file with 241543903. The idea is that if you search for this cryptic tag, all the photos of heads in freezers will appear. I just did one". By January 2010, there were hundreds of Flickr photographs filed under the tag “241543903” and the idea soon spread to other social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

In November 2010, the meme was mentioned in Horvitz’ book of instructions titled Everything That Can Happen in a Day, published by Random House.

Wikipedia Reader
In A Wikipedia Reader (2009) Horvitz asked a group of artists to conduct a Wikipedia search and then to continue onto other articles through linked words, "creating a string of ideas that could be printed and presented as a series of articles in a newspaper-like format. The resulting collection represents 23 of these mental maps, which chart the artists' short journeys through the wilds of the collectively-edited online encyclopedia. The book was commissioned by the Art Libraries Society of New York.

Public Access
In December 2010 and January 2011, Horvitz and Ed Steck drove the whole California coast up the Pacific Coast Highway, starting at Border Field State Park on the Mexican Border, and ending at Pelican State Beach on the Oregon Border. At each of 50 chosen locations, Horvitz took pictures of the ocean view, standing with the frame of the shot. "All of these images were then placed onto the Wikipedia articles about the different locations".

"The intent was that these images would begin to circulate in this public place as visual information surrounding the geographic location, as a kind of metadata for the locations. Another thought that emerged from this project was a play between the ideas of omnipresence and remoteness. There is an omnipresence to the internet. It is a site of the instantaneous flowing of information between different locations. Some of the locations I ventured to were remote. They were out of cell-phone signal, away from cities, and sometimes even miles from highways. They were accessible, but took effort to get there."

This provoked a storm of opposition in the Wikipedia community, as the administration tried to work out the identity of the uploader (who was contributing from different IPs), and his or her purpose. Some of the photos were cropped, most of the others were thought to lack any illustrative or artistic merit, and were deleted from [[Wikimedia Commons].

A text about the event by Steck, and the photos taken for Public Access are now on view at "As Yet Untitled: Artists and Writers in Collaboration" at SF Camerawork in San Francisco.

Outside links

 * Everything that can happen in a day
 * A Wikipedia Reader
 * Public Access