tinyvices.com existed from 2005-2010. It was an experimental curatorial web-project, edited and organized by me, Tim Barber, showcasing work from a global network of photographers and artists. At its peak, the site had thousands of visitors a day, and artists’ submissions flooded in from all over the world. It was a unique hub, showcasing a vast array of artists and images at a critical hinge point in the newly developing online world.
I want to re-present this archive now because I’ve always thought of the tinyvices project as a time capsule from a specific era, a transitional period full of cultural shifts: from film to digital, media to social-media, cameras to phones, world to world wide web. The site itself was always shifting and hard to define. Was it a blog? A collective? A publication? An art gallery? An artwork? I was never really sure, but I always called it an archive, and all these years later I regretted that it didn’t exist anywhere online.
I started the site during my second (and last) year working as photo editor for Vice Magazine. I had studied photography at Emily Carr in Vancouver, Canada before moving to NYC in 2003, so I was connected to youthful art scenes in both countries and on both coasts. A few of my friends had started photo/art-centric websites (a relatively new practice in those days) and they inspired me to do the same. The artist Terence Koh was an early online-pioneer with his multifaceted web-art-project Asian Punk Boy. The writer and editor Amy Kellner ran the photo-blog-diary Teenage Unicorn, a funny and earnest window into her downtown New York life. Patrick O’Dell had started Epicly Later’d, a diaristic stream from his adventures as a skate and portrait photographer. Patrick actually taught me how to build my site using the software that came with Netscape Navigator. The program was rudimentary and tedious but the outcome felt novel and exciting for its time: a simple and seemingly limitless space to share and connect to a newly forming online world. tinyvices started as a straightforward photo blog (the name “tiny vices” actually came from the Bill Callahan song “Hangmans Blues”) but along with my own digital snapshots from nights out, art events and shows, I started editing and sharing portfolios of other peoples’ photography and artwork. This turned the site into a kind of free-form gallery space or publication, where new and eclectic work was being showcased to a growing global audience. I had an “open call for submissions” on the site, and as the link got passed around the submissions multiplied exponentially and the site grew and grew. This was before and during the rise of social media. The giant corporate platforms hadn’t absorbed and flattened everything yet, and the organic, aggregate nature of tinyvices caused its audience to spread.
After a few years of running tinyvices I started to get invitations from gallery spaces to curate physical exhibitions based on what I was showcasing on the site. These large scale installations featured hundreds of artists and were exhibited all around the world. I also started a small, independent book imprint called TV Books that published monographs and collections of many of the featured artists, and worked with other publishers on curating and designing art books.
I shut down the original site around 2010. I was burnt out from maintaining it and wanted to focus on being a photographer. I built another follow up site a few years later called “Time & Space,” my attempt at an actual social-network for artists, but it was short-lived. At that point platforms like instagram and tumblr had taken over how people shared their work online.
To build this site I reviewed the entire archive and re-edited and re-organized all the work. It has been many years and many computers and hard drives so some things have certainly been lost in the shuffle. There was also a back-log of work in the archive that had been submitted and edited but never shared on the site, so I included some previously unshared work. There's also a special feature on the home page - a randomized slideshow that pulls from all the images on the site (over 10,000 images from more then 680 contributors!) I’ve always loved slideshows and wanted to present the whole tinyvices archive in that format, as a simple, randomized slideshow that you can just sit back and watch. I worked with a developer to maximize the randomness of the sequencing (programming something to be truly “random” is more complicated than you might think) and I’m really happy with how it turned out. Visitors can also navigate by artist name via the contributors page, view the work individually or in a thumbnail grid (#), and advance through images with the arrow keys on their keyboard. It works on a phone, but I recommend looking at it on a bigger monitor if possible.
Thanks for looking ;)
- IMPORTANT -
All the work on this site was submitted by the credited artists. These artists own their copyrights and are responsible for their own work.
If you see any mistakes, miss-spelled names, miss-representations, incorrect credits or anything else please send an email with the details (screenshots would be helpful for this if possible).
If your work is on this site and you would like it removed it please send an email.
Please do not take images from this site and post them elsewhere without giving proper credit to the artists / creators.
contact : timbarbernyc(at)gmail.com
* SPECIAL THANK YOU *
Naz Hassan, Emmett Shine, Su Barber, Georgia Hilmer, Balarama Heller, Erik Pendleton & Everyone who contributed to this site.