Sometimes an idea is very simple, yet very deep. Like this idea of recording one second of every day of your life. That’s what Cesar Kuriyama did when he stopped working. He learned a lot by doing so. The BBC interviewed him and he was invited for a TED presentation.
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This is not an automatic capturing of some shots during your everyday life. The procedure Kuriyama proposes, involves decision-making. What are the images of the day you want to keep, so you’ll watch them one year from now, or ten years, or when you’re very old and about to pass away? To me it seems like an exercise in mindfulness. One might also wonder whether this recording ritual influences what one actually does during a particular day. Kuriyama himself says this whole procedure stimulates him to do at least one interesting thing each day.
Kuriyama also runs a blog, One Second Every Day, on which he published some of his favorite reactions on his TED talk. Someone had a very interesting vision: suppose that many people would start recording one second every day and that something very important on a worldwide scale happened, and one could look at that day through the eyes of ‘the human race’ just by telling the computer to make a selection from the accumulated recordings for that day. Or, less dramatic, suppose you could filter those recordings and tell the computer to show you a particular place through the eyes not of institutional reporters and communicators but again through the eyes of random people recording on that place their seconds of existence.
Anyway, Kuriyama launched a Kickstarter project for developing an app enabling us to record our life seconds. This app will be available in the next few days on iOS and later also on Android.
And this is the video of one year of Cesar Kuriyama:
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1 Second Everyday – Age 30 from Cesar Kuriyama on Vimeo.
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Update: the app is now available for iOS.
This work by rolandlegrand is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
This is a great find, thank you for posting it. And a great example of the kind of thing I was trying to get to with http://emalliab.wordpress.com/2011/12/23/write-only-memories/, but generally only hinting at – how one might consider starting to curate their digital memories rather than simply archiving them.
It is also interesting to read about the unexpected side effects of ‘looking back and making each day count’.
A fascinating idea.
Kevin.