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Dziga Vertov and Social Media
A century ago Dennis Arkadievitch Kaufmann, more commonly known as Dziga Vertov, the spinning top, came up with the concept of the All-Seeing Eye. The Kinoki. The Cinema Eye. His idea was that with time life unawares could be documented and daily life would be captured by cameras for everyone to see.
Until recently the idea of filming and documenting everyone with video and photo cameras was an act of fiction. Rolls of films had only 36 frames and DV tapes only lasted 63 minutes. Cameras were dedicated devices that you did not have with you at all times and to take pictures was expensive and you needed space for storage.
If we were to take 36 pictures I think we would have paid 1.20 CHF per image recently. DV tapes were about 15 CHF per tape depending on how many you bought at once.
Today we have two or three cameras with us at all times with gigabytes of storage. With the iPhone we could easily take a thousand pictures in a day if we had a way of recharging the battery halfway through.
We also have the means to share these images. We have Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Whatsapp. We also have blogs. We could mention Flickr and SmugMug but they have angered those who loved their site to the point of losing their users.
When I was streaming live from Paléo a few years ago I was groundbreaking by using the phone and QIK or Bambuser.
Fast forward a few years and live streaming of music events has progressed.
We have gone from cameras that were stuck on the ground and barely moved to FPV video cameras that fly and follow snowboarders as they jump and slide down mountain faces. The camera no longer needs to be on the ground to be steady and get good images. Without weight the Kinoki can see scenes like this:
These all-seeing eyes can also fly in the landscape and show us the world as only a wingsuit flyer could have seen it in the past. We can see the same things without risking our lives or devoting hours of training to get to the right level of competence.
We then see Paris in the 1900s and now. We see how some things have stayed exactly the same and how other things have changed. The main difference is that in the 1900s it would have been a wooden camera with a wooden tripod and in modern days a carbon fibre tripod with a modern camera.
There is also this footage of 1900s Paris in colour.
The All-Seeing Eye then takes us to 1911 New York and we see life with cars and people walking across a street. Sound was added later.
An old-style educational video of how hydraulic steering works.
Compare to this modern documentary
When we jump forward a few decades we have this footage of 1960s London.
Of course the diversity captured by the All Seeing Eye does not stop there. We often come across arts that are preserved by a single individual, which thanks to the all seeing eye, is preserved for future generations
When I was on one of my daily walks I expected that this would be a long written blog post about theories and reasoning but in the end it becomes a collection of videos to explore the diversity of topics that the “all-seeing eye” can capture. The topic is broad and this is just a tiny glimpse.
An Open letter of complaint to Netflix Switzerland.
Dear deceptive content distributors,
When I have wanted to watch a number of documentaries the subtitles have been in German on english commentary documentaries. As a paying customer I expect English language versions to have English titles, English subtitles and English location information.
If you do nothing to resolve this problem I will stop paying monthly for your content as you are not delivering what I am paying for. Do not cut corners. Be professional.
“Superhuman” Climbers
A few days ago the Rio Paralympics “We’re The Superhumans” video popped in to my newsfeed on Facebook and I eventually watched it. The moment that most impressed me is the olympic athlete climbing 2 minutes 20 in. He is dynamic in his climbing technique despite not having any hands. As a climber those two or three shots impressed me and it encouraged me to look for more such climbing videos. They are interesting. It is nice to see climbers take their passion to the next level.
I often think that climbing is a mental game. Most of us have to overcome our fear of heights and we need to learn to read the climbing wall, hand holds and foot holds to climb up as elegantly as possible and without getting tired. Overcoming that fear of heights takes exposure. The more you climb the more you get to grips with the feeling of being high off the ground. You also learn to trust yourself and your equipment. That trust allows you to see opportunities and use them. David Bowes was injured in a road traffic accident while commuting one day. In the clip below he says that despite not always enjoying the moments when he is climbing he always feels better when he gets home and that this is why he climbs.
In the third video we see that climbing is not limited to people who want to become world class athletes. We see that climbing is for people who simply want to work on their self confidence. They overcome their disabilities, feel pride and build their confidence. Every one of us gains by climbing.
We see that some people climb with prosthetics and that others are climbing using just their arms. In other cases people are using artificial limbs to get up the wall. We see that some people with one arm lever their body in to a stable position that lasts just long enough to let go of one hand hold and grab on to the next one. It is enjoyable to see how much ingenuity goes in to climbing.
As we see in the final video some groups want to provide people with the opportunity to climb at least once and to reach the top of the wall. Whether they become passionate about the sport or not is not what matters. What matters is that they get a sense of accomplishment, of setting and reaching that goal. These videos are empowering as we see that anyone with