In this interesting video, recordered @ TED, a 31 years old guy, named Cesar Kuriyama, speaks about is project “One second every day”. He decided to record, form a personal perspective (read: what he actually sees), 1 second of his life every day, including not just fancy and nice things he did but also bad moments.
The result, that is embedded in the TED speach, is somehow confusing but also interesting. A timeline of somebody else, put together in a sequence, including audio, is something “useful” for the author himself (who honestly claims that he’s doing it just for him to avoid forgetting his life) but somehow interesting also for the viewer. Mentally I tried to reconstruct that 1 second of his life, looking to the faces, the places, the activities. And I started to think about the reasons pushing a young man to remember his life, and it’s moments. And, of course, I found myself thinking to the relationship between this “video” activity and photography, where this kind of personal projects are quite common. What’s the difference between 1 second of video and 1/125 of second? A still image vs nearly a “long exposure” in photographic terms? He can do this, and theoretically everybody today can do this because we have these HD capable smartphones. If you look at the process itself of recording and selecting there is TIME needed to carry on a project like this. Cesar himself says that he take more the 1 second (3/4) and he has to choose that single one that he likes. So, as all photographers normally do, he actually “edits” his collection of seconds. Don’t know if he does it every day, but to me this type of “collecting memory” process is quite hard to be mainteined. More then capturing a single photographs a day. So I think that he ends up remembering his life also for the TIME he needs to dedicate to this project, selecting the “right second”, storing it, putting it in a timeline. Not really sure about the real value of an operation like this. It helps memory, as also photography has always done, but would you do this? Do we really need to remember this way or, maybe, some still images are just enough to trigger our memories without taking too much time of our present to remember the past?