image/music/text

dailymeh:

Lately I’ve heard from many corners that there’s too much imagery out there, and that artists shouldn’t add more to the pile, but instead find new uses for what already exists. This strikes me as an insult to the whole history of art, and furthermore a dangerous lack of ambition. We will not remember Google Street View artists in a hundred years, or we won’t remember them for their Google Street View projects, anyway. Nevertheless, it’s true that there is a lot of imagery out there, and it’s true that there are gems to be found.

Here’s something neat. It’s anonymous, it’s unpretentious, it’s enormous and it appears to be relatively unknown. It is the Video Museum of City People. Here is the “artist’s statement” (edited for punctuation):

Here is collection of videos taken from cities around the world. I record video on the streets to see people of the town. Atmosphere of towns are affected by people. To record its atmosphere, I focus on people, not building and landscape. Attention!! These are boring; just videotaped on the street and upload them. No editing, no story, and not TV programs or movies that have a lof of interesting scene and exciting scene. Please understand these are just records, not entertainment.

The videos are from cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Budapest, Tunis, Singapore, Delhi, Ljubljana, Berlin, Helsinki, San Francisco. Our anonymous globetrotter—who reveals only his or her country of origin (Japan) and hides behind a string of random letters—plops down their camera on a tripod and records a ten-minute snippet from crowded city streets. The author never replies to comments, and the account has one favorite video: the Lumiere brothers’ first films (1895). That’s refreshing, in the age of social media and personal branding and adsense and YouTube partnerships and ChipIn and Kickstarter.

It’s infinitely more engaging than Google Street View, since you can see and hear the movement of the crowd. It’s people watching for people who don’t like to go outside, and for all of us who can’t travel to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Budapest et cetera on a whim. The description is correct: it is boring. Nothing happens. And yet, if you let your eyes wander, if you stream it in the background, you begin to notice things. Hundreds of people in surgical masks walk through a Tokyo subway station. A young boy grimaces at the camera on a street in Hong Kong. Rickshaws swing by in Delhi. Dour-looking Eastern Europeans hurry past in Ljubljana.

There’s something of the obsessed collector in this, albeit an odd sort of collector: one who collects the likenesses of random cross-sections of city-dwelling populations. It truly is a museum. Someone has clearly put a whole lot of effort into this. There is probably hundreds of hours of footage up there, from all over the world. The YouTube account has 3 million combined views, which sounds like a lot, but really isn’t, when distributed across thousands of videos and six years. A small group of eager followers (around 1,500 subscribers at the moment) and random googlers are the audience. I don’t know what you’re getting out of this, anonymous Japanese globetrotter, but thanks for doing it.