How to become a pixel in the collaborative portrait of the world.
In every moment, billions of human lives around the world are unfolding in vastly different ways, filling the space-time continuum with a myriad of experiences, with great loves and great losses, with triumphs and tragedies, with conflict and compassion, with unremarkable mundanity seen through a remarkably rich array of lenses. One Day On Earth is a new multi-platform participatory media project rallying documentary filmmakers, students and ordinary citizens around the world to capture 24 hours in the life of the planet.
On October 10 this year — 10.10.10 — people in every single country across the globe will record footage telling their stories and peeling away at their lives, which will then be collaged into a two-hour feature-length documentary to be released theatrically.
To become a part of this micro-timecapsule of humanity, sign up to participate in the project and take a peek at many who have already joined around the world.
Besides being a brave experiment in collaborative storytelling, the project is a bold effort to find out who we are, as a culture and a civilization, and what we stand for in the grand scheme of human existence. Will we like what we see?
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What urban storytelling has to do with the end of WWII and Google Maps mashups.
Photographic Time Machine is one of our all-time most popular articles, but it spotlights projects that, while fascinating, are one-off art experiments. How fantastic would it be if there were a broader, more expansive platform for intersecting past and present through historical photography, a digital time machine of sorts? Well, now there is. Enter Historypin — a mashup of modern mapping and archival photos that offers a new way to explore and share history.
Developed by We Are What We Do, the social movement behind Anya Hindmarch’s now-iconic I’m Not a Plastic Bag bag, in partnership with Google, the project pulls photos from various national archives and private-sector collections, and “pins” them over Google Maps Street View to create a fascinating fold in the space/time continuum.
Archival photos can both be dated and geotagged, painting a precise portrait of how specific locations have changed. Users can even submit their own and write stories about them, adding a wonderful urban storytelling component akin to Hitotoki.
From 19th-century views of Baltimore and Potomac Railway Station to London’s iconic High Street on Victory in Europe Day in 1945, Historypin features nearly 2,000 photos and stories pinned just a couple of days after the official launch and has the potential to become the largest user-generated archive of historical images and stories, documenting not only how the physicality of our world is changing but also how our experience of it is responding to those changes — a priceless timecapsule of cultural change.
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Frames, doodles, and how to weave a digital quilt out of legendary music and cultural history.
Our friend Aaron Koblin — he of Sheep Market and Bicycle Built for 2,000 fame — is back with a brilliant new project in collaboration with director Chris Milk for Lost Highway records: The Johnny Cash Project, a global collaborative art project constructing a music video for Cash’s final studio recording, “Ain’t No Grave,” from hundreds of user-submitted one-of-a-kind portraits of the iconic artist.
The drawings are crowdsourced using an online tool similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which randomly selects three frames for the contributor to choose from and draw.
The Johnny Cash Project is a visual testament to how the Man in Black lives on — not just through his vast musical legacy, but in the hearts and minds of all of us around the world he has touched with his talent, his passion, and his indomitable spirit.
Needless to say, we love both the concept and the execution — not only because it offers an intriguing contrast between this digital playground and what we’ve always found to be the rustic, analog appeal of Cash’s sound, but also because it crafts a beautiful metaphor for the breadth and impact of his music, revealing both the uniquely intimate experience of each listener and the powerful global cultural resonance of his heritage.
Contribute your thread to this wonderful collaboratively woven magic.
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Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it's cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week's best articles. Here's an example. Like? Sign up.
In every moment, billions of human lives around the world are unfolding in vastly different ways, filling the space-time continuum with a myriad of experiences, with great loves and great losses, with triumphs and tragedies, with conflict and compassion, with unremarkable mundanity seen through a remarkably rich array of lenses. One Day On Earth is a new multi-platform participatory media project rallying documentary filmmakers, students and ordinary citizens around the world to capture 24 hours in the life of the planet.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
You can algorithmically curate various versions of the video by toggling between different criteria by which to sort the individual frames — 
