If you want your photo to be considered for inclusion to the collection, post it on Instagram with the #thisiscircusnet tag.
This site is oriented towards contemporary (rather than classical) circus.
You can contact me at thisiscircusnet@gmail.com
Definition
From Wikipedia:
A circus is a company of performers that may include clowns, acrobats, trained animals, trapeze acts, musicians, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, unicyclists and other object manipulation and stunt-oriented artists.
Contemporary circus has been credited with reviving the circus tradition since the 1980s when a number of groups introduced circus based almost solely on human skills and which drew from other performing art skills and styles.
Contemporary circus is a genre of performing art developed in the later 20th century in which a story or a theme is conveyed through traditional circus skills. Animals are rarely used in this type of circus, and traditional circus skills are blended with a more character-driven approach. Compared with the traditional circuses of the past, the contemporary approach tends to focus more attention on the overall aesthetic impact, on character and story development, and on the use of lighting design, original music, and costume design to convey thematic or narrative content.
Why?
I've had several discussions around the topic "what is circus?". I've also tried to explain circus to people that are not familiar with it. They say a picture is worth 1000 words, so I thought that putting together a collage of images could be a good way to express all the things that are circus. A whirlwind tour to the circus world if you will.
I made thisiscircus.com to:
- inspire circus artists and circus enthusiasts
- raise awareness about the circus
What is circus?
For me circus is about exploration, experimentation, expression. It's fun and it's hard work. It's about creating images, telling stories and enchanting audiences.
What is circus for you? You should send me your answer!
The process
I wrote a script to download the entire dataset of photos (and their metadata) from circus related tags on Instagram.
Specifically, the tags are:
acrobatics, aerialhoop, aerialstraps, banquine, chinesepole, circus, circusaroundtheworld, circusartistcirque, circuseverydamnday, circusinspiration, circuslife, circusschool, cirque, contemporarycircus, contortion, cordelisse, cyrwheel, flyingtrapeze, germanwheel, gravityandothermyths, handbalancer, handbalancing, handstandeverydamnday, handstandtraining, handtohand, ithinkmycircusisshowing, juggling, partneracrobatics, russianbar, russianswing, teeterboard, tightwire.
If you want to know more about the different circus skills and disciplines you can visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_circus_skills and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acrobatic_activities
The total size of the database is 1.5GB (!), without storing any photos (just links to the photos).
That's around 1.300.000 photos.
Here's a screenshot of the database:
Then, I sorted them by most likes and kept the first 2000 photos (for every tag separately).
The photos with the most likes ought to be the "best", no? Well, not always but it was a reasonable first filtering (1st pass).
Here's a screenshot of the "handtohand" tag sorted by most likes:
Then, I handpicked the ones that I liked best (2nd pass, selection means inclusion).
Then gathered the selected ones from all the tags and excluded the ones that were not that good (3rd pass, selection means exclusion).
After this process I ended up with 700+ photos, which are the ones you see in the collection.
I was actually expecting Instagram to be a better pool of photos than it turned out to be.
Selection criteria
I tried to select the photos based on the following criteria: athletic ability, artistic value, unconventional shots, photos that inspire, candid moments from training.
It was a good exercise in aesthetics.
Feedback
You can send me your ideas or suggestions.
"Videos" and "ability to filter by category" are already known requests.
If you like circus and want to help out with the website (non tech stuff, like help with the selection of the photos), send me an email.
Also, I would be interested in doing additional "tech projects" about the circus so if you've got ideas or want to collaborate, get in touch.
Some quotes
"You may not be a Picasso or MozartBut you don't have to be
Just create to create
Create to remind yourself you're still alive
Create to inspire others to create too
Create to learn a bit more about yourself" - Frederic Terral
"Creativity takes courage." - Henri Matisse
"If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all." - Michelangelo
"Then my soul is on fire with inspiration, if however nothing occurs to distract my attention. The work grows; I keep expanding it, conceiving it more and more clearly until I have the entire composition finished in my head though it may be long... It does not come to me successively, with its various parts worked out in detail, as they will be later on, but it is in its entirety that my imagination lets me hear it." - Mozart
"The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act." - Marcel Duchamp
"When you're an artist and you're creating new works you have to have passion because you want to make it the best that you can. You want to make it as clear as you can and you want to do things you've never done before. You want to make things that have never existed before, you want to make new things; you don't want to repeat yourself. At the same time you want people to feel these things are new, make them communicate, become part of the culture and to inspire other human beings - this is my number one goal when I make new work. That's the pressure." - Shen Wei