While this isn’t a new project, and maybe not entirely related to my blog, I re-found this project the other day while I was online. I think that I had only seen the youtube video before, and not actually checked out the projects website, Noah K Everyday, and I liked the project statement. While this isn’t a creepy exploit of new media or new technology, it is an interesting use and investigation of uses and applications of both new media and technology. In the FAQ section on his website, one of the questions is “Why?!” and the response is, “With the emergence of digital technology as a means to quickly and affordably take on a long term photography project, coupled with an interest in the subtleties of the ageing process, I started photographing myself every day.”
I spent an afternoon a few summers ago scanning all of the photos that my grandma has at her house from when she was my age and before. She has one photograph of one of my great-grandpas and very few photos of her when she was my age or from her college days (the only one I can think of is her finishing off a bottle of vodka, sitting at her dorm room desk in front of a photo of Johnny Mathis). I have gigabytes of photos from my college years, thousands of images documenting every semester, month, week, event of my college career. There is a short story that I read, and I can’t remember much about it now other than that the premise was that computer companies were stealing memory from people in order to insert that memory into computers, so as computers had more and more memory, we had less and less. (I just looked around and I can’t remember or figure out what the story was, it might have been an audio story, too. I can’t remember, if you know you should post it here as a comment). Regardless, the story was extreme, with Microsoft mining into peoples minds to steal megabytes, but has some truth. How much of the memories that I have are just mental images of a jpeg on my hard drive and how much comes from the event itself. I don’t want to make myself look totally reactionary, and I’m not against new media and technology. I think that there are definitely benefits that come from many of these advances, but I think that thinking about these changes, and being aware of them is also an important thing to do.
You can find a youtube video of the first six years of Noah’s project here:
And find newer photos from the project on his website, at www.everyday.noahkalina.com.
