15 Minutes at the Met | Ancient Egypt
Kelsey and I were walking around the Upper East Side of Manhattan this afternoon, and went into the Metropolitan Museum of Art 15 minutes before closing time. We only had time to see one exhibit (Ancient Egypt) , but it was a fantastic quick date for both of us.
I think “15 Minutes” is a great idea for an ongoing photojournalism / photoblogging series. Take a camera, give yourself 15 minutes to capture the essence of the place you’re visiting, and pick the best shots of your experience. It’s a wonderful exercise in “embracing constraints,” and it’s a great deal of fun.
(For those of you who aren’t aware, Kelsey and I recently moved to Manhattan. More details coming soon.)
Josh,
I agree 15 minutes to be a good time span for forcing yourself to focus fully and as a result experience it more deeply.
Having said this, last Sunday I went to a museum for contempory art in Gent, Belgium the ‘SMAK’ (www.smak.be) and saw an amazing documentary film called ‘The Future is Not What it Used to Be’ from Mika Taanlia about the other extreme;
- The documentary is about a guy from Finland, named Erkki Kurenniemi, who is devoted to the obsessive, even manic, effort to record his own life, preserving all his thoughts and observations, trivial objects, and a constant stream of images, continually recording an audio diary, making videotapes, and shooting 20,000 photographs a year!
This accumulating mass of documentation is then regularly fed into a computer, storing the record of his existence, his mind and consciousness in digital bytes, thus creating a reconstruction of his life, a “virtual persona,” to be premiered in July, 2048.
Perhaps fulfilling some sort of quest for immortality, Kurenniemi’s project can be seen as the logical extension of the notion of merging man and machine, of technologically reconstructing the human soul. - (see also http://www.kinotar.com)
What about that as an idea for a blog!?!
John
BTW: Awesome the 2 of you managed to get to NY! Looking forward to the details