trees are people too

Manifesto scenario.

I have realised I need to add one more proposition to my manifesto to make this scenario feasible (the need to tag videos in order to sort them), but this is very helpful in formulating reasons and background to why my manifesto is. This is just a short and extremely basic scenario – as my manifesto is very broad and general, the scenario could be completely different each time, and idealistically would be much more profound than this.

But this is the first time I have tried ‘scenario-ising’ as a creative process, so you’ll have to forgive it its rudimentary-ness. The point, the value of these videos becomes the experience they offer – a scenario is a perfect way to depict this.

Lifemapping

I leave my house for the day, and as I am walking down the street I take a short video to capture the mood of the day: the weather, the light, the wind, the time. It’s jolty and amateurish, but I want to capture the neighbourhood in this state – quiet, empty and grey. I record it on my phone – I don’t have my camera handy – and the quality is low, but I only need a few minutes to encompass what I am trying to portray, to say.

I travel to work, and when I arrive I am again perplexed by the state of my desk – I always leave it in this state and I always regret it. But I have devised a system for organising it as quickly as possible. I decide to record it – it’s banal but useful method of arranging things first chronologically and then in order of priority, and includes both physical and online documents and proposals. I set up my camera next to me and leave it recording for the next half hour as I pander to the needs of my workspace. When I am content with my new arrangements I stop recording.

That evening I am cooking for my dad and sister. I am trying a new recipe and it is somewhat ambitious, but I enlist some help from my housemate and we get to working fithying up the kitchen, using a recipe video we have downloaded from lifemap.com. I record it for reference – we love to share recipes with friends and family, and the visual format works well for us – we can play it on the screen on our fridge while we work in the kitchen. Halfway through I realise I have forgotten a crucial ingredient, but a quick check of similar recipes shows that other people have had the same problem – and provide suggestions for alternatives. We finish the recipe Ad Hoc and dinner is a success. I record dinner, and the fat, happy and full responses, as a finale to the mapping of my cooking, so people know how good it was.

That evening I sit down and logon to lifemap.com. Over 1500 videos have been uploaded today alone, and the subjects are extensive – I can look at videos from all over the world featuring any subject I can think of. But tonight I am looking for local neighbourhoods – we are thinking of moving. A quick search via tags and images finds a park a few streets away from us that I haven’t visited before. It’s a quiet recording of a summer’s day in the grass and the park looks well established and inviting. A few more searches and I have found a video of someone’s jog around the same park – now I start to get a feel for the whole area. I share this with my housemates and she agrees it’s got potential. We’ll visit it tomorrow.

Before I go to bed I upload my videos for the day – I know the cooking one will be particularly popular, people love to share their cooking experiences. I tag it ‘cannelloni’, and then as an afterthought add a couple more tags: ‘impromptu’ and ‘improvised’. The speed of my broadband means it only takes a few seconds to upload the videos (they are tiny, already compressed thanks to my camera and phone) and within 5 minutes I can see someone has already clicked on the video of my morning walk down my street, perhaps another potential renter scouting out the area.

Tomorrow I’ll document more.