Over the course of the year I collected films and other works of art bearing a relationship to this film.

I couldn’t help come across the many people taking pictures of themselves, their children, their pets, their hair styles etc etc every day and posting them on the internet (which people would regularly send me examples of). This has become something of an internet meme.  The proliferation of these films on the net started with Noah Kalina who began taking a photo of himself every day  in January 2000 and posted his first compilation of photo’s in 2006  (this culminated in an appearance on The Simpsons ). Other examples are Jeff Harris  started his self portrait project in 1999 which resulted in a short you tube documentary and  Cesar Kuyarma who has filmed a second every day of his life for the last few years.

These films show our ongoing fascination with documenting daily life through film and photography. Some of these films simply document the changes that happen over time, others try to say more about the the experience of day to day existence.

There are many interesting examples of people capturing daily experience with photographs and film that pre-date the internet or aren’t as easily accessable.

The character Auggie played by Harvey Keitel in the 1995 film Smoke (written by Paul Auster) took pictures everyday of the same street corner.

Experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas  created some incredible films using daily film diaries he started shooting on Super 8 in 1970 and  Anne Charlotte Robertson started her Super 8 film diaries in 1980. Filmmaker Jamie Livingston documented his life with a daily polariod photo between 1979 and 1997 while dying of brain cancer.

More recently artist  Laurel Nakadate took a photograph of herself crying every day which was exhibited in MoMA (interestingly she has also made film called Stay the Same.) Yuri A. uses passport photographs over the years in her film Family.

There are lots of examples of art work specifically related to the use of film techniques to explore our experience of time, such as Christian Marclay’s Clock , the films of Reynold Reynolds and and Tim MacMillian’s Timefreeze artwork.  I even collected examples of  art just involving the creation of clocks in the blog post Clocks for New Year.

I was  interested in films and artists videos dealing with our relationship to changing landscapes with films like NEWS, WEATHER & SPORTS by Dan Hudson and the work of James Benning . This could also include the beautiful film Time by Sam Spreckly.

I am probably most inspired, however by filmmakers like Jonas Meekas and Agnes Varda who try to use film, not just to document change but to capture the essence of human experience over time, which I have discovered is almost an impossibility.