In which I go for a walk… on YouTube
This is part of the work I’m putting together for my residency in Moskosel, in northern Sweden.
For my main piece, I have created a work that is to be consumed in a shipping container that will travel Sweden. This work is based around a number of videos which I shot during two trips, where I visited a dozen, or so, countries.
My take on travel is to explore the world on your own terms, fighting the corporate map when and where you can. This includes slowing down, not being lived by the needling of platforms like Google Maps and Tripadvisor.
My main piece is web-based, which allows it to be different, every time you look at it. However, this makes it a bit harder to be played in the traveling container, which then needs to split a browser window over three projectors, while being able to rely on a good-enough internet connection.
I figured having a few fallback solutions would be practical.
It felt natural to put together a playlist of all my recordings, creating a single stream that lasts about 30 hours, and can function like a kind of moving painting, creating a slowly, but ever-changing, scenery, while providing a window into other worlds.
This, in a similar way to how you can find long videos of log fires crackling, or watch fishes scuttle by in long recordings of some aquarium.
In this set of videos, I start my walk at home, just outside of São Paulo, in Brazil, make my way, through a dozen, or so, countries, to Moskosel Creative Lab, and then return home.
Because outside of the context of my residency at Moskosel Creative Lab, my journey to the little-known town of Moskosel, to stare at a container in the snow, might be puzzling, I created a nearly-identical playlist, where I don’t walk to Moskosel, but instead walk to the town I grew up in, Delft, in the Netherlands, to eat a raw herring, before returning to Brazil.
This somewhat absurdist goal, traveling the world such that I can eat a raw herring, seems fitting for how I pick and choose what to focus on when on the road.
While cutting the videos, and after using the AI image generation tool Midjourney to create featured images for the location-based podcasts I made for this same residency, I realised that, to very much stay in the spirit of AR, Augmented Reality, I had to ask Midjourney to suggest a few logos that would fit my project.
I was not disappointed. You can see the version I picked on the title cards of the videos, and at the top of this post.
Initially, I had considered to also create a single very long video, essentially the videos of the playlist all strung together. But, I gave up on this for the challenge of the logistics that this would involve, as I estimate the exported file to approach around 100GB in size.
Either way, the playlist has exactly the same effect.
However, I also created a static approximation of my main piece; three individual videos that can be projected independently, and together create an experience that is an acceptable facsimile of my main piece.
The three components are also accessible as individual videos.
The combined video, as well as the individual components, run for about 37 minutes. The main piece, which is dynamic, runs for 4.5 – 5 hours.