For the past 3 years Christie Strong and I have lived, collaborated and traveled the world together but on January 1st, we decided together that the most powerful thing that each of us could do is separate. We made this decision together over a somewhat epic walk around Chiang Mai Thailand in the morning light walking down streets littered with exploded fireworks.
I was feeling the beginning of a long road of solitude ahead and realized I really needed a new best friend. So I turned to an old best friend. The camera. The new person I can do everything with. We can converse endlessly about any topic. We can each be a mirror showing the other their true self and be together no matter what happens.
I strapped the camera to my red tie, popped in a 32 gig card, plugged-in an all day battery pack and stepped out into the world.
iPad taken self portrait of my Tie Cam… since i”m in Thailand right now I sometimes call it my “Thai Cam”.
So far I’ve realized that a camera is actually not an effective substitute for Christie. However, the experiment has proved interesting anyway.
I have a dream to one day create an epic Sci-Fi film and in the story world the characters have archives of their entire lives that they are able to use in conversations with others as well as to review and even re-edit their history to tell the story they believe they are living.
In the first 9 days of filming I’ve already gotten several ideas for the Sci-Fi project and huge insights into who I am and what I typically do when left to my own devices. I’m also finding a lot of draw backs to this process. I have to be very careful at all times to not talk about people behind their backs and I wish I could say this was easy. I also have to make sure to not do anything illegal or witness anyone doing anything illegal. I also always have to disclose that I’m recording and will put the footage on the internet. I also have to deal with incredibly compromised privacy for myself because in order for this experiment to work I’ve committed to recording when ever I’m talking to anyone or doing anything. I’m not filming sleep, nudity, watching movies, reading or checking social media feeds or private messages but basically everything else is getting rolled on so there may be scrutiny from others who might scrub through the archives and I judge me in the future for something that happened in the past. Part of the experiment is to allow others to join in the process following a tutorial I will post on how I’m doing this and also allowing people to take my videos and use them in in way they wish. Keepvid.com and other tools allow the easy downloading of any YouTube video and I’ve placed a creative commons license on all my footage so by default people have my permission to use what I’ve captured for what ever they like and yes I realize this is incredibly risky.
But all of that is easy. The hard part is actually having to start to have integrity with myself. When I say I’m going to do something the camera is rolling and therefor the moment carries more weight. It’s no longer possible to just let all of my visions fall by the waist side and constantly betray myself. I’m learning a lot about myself already and getting great insights for the Sci-Fi project as well.
So I’ve turned this project into a challenge and have been telling people I will upload raw footage every single day in 2013. Since what I say is now what I have to do… here we are. The playlist below will contain every single day in 2013. I encourage people to not try watch a whole day but instead just pick a random spot in a random video and make a comment on what you saw. It could be just info about what’s being talked about to help catalog or maybe you have something to say that you would have said if you had been there or maybe you have a question or some advice. You can include the hour, minute and second you are referring to in your comment by typing in the counter number such as “1:30:22”. YouTube will make the number in your comment actually be a click-able link to that when clicked will jump to that point in the video. I’ll respond and it’ll be a fairly unique time shifted omni present 4th dimension experience.
If you find this experiment interesting your welcome to subscribe to my youtube channel. My goal isn’t to get lots of people involved but just have a few good people participating from beginning to end. I’m looking to simulate a world where everyone does this with out even questioning it and it just becomes baked into the culture and part of the natural experience of life. This is a world I also believe we will likely live in one day so am very fascinated to explore what we should all be prepared for.
Arin Crumley 