New York is a city that seems made for video cameras. Even more than photography, where the click of a button can capture a moment in time for the next generation, preserving an energy in motion, video cameras can track the speed of life here. Or seem to. Watching New York on video is a very different thing than seeing snapshots, and some of the best clips can actually give a sense of what it feels like to be here. And once people are here, there seems to be an increasing need to document experience in the best medium available.
There’s something about the city that invites it. The New York video capturing Times Square in Times Square is one of those great moments in uncanniness, and still has a profound effect on the people gathering there, as well as the ones unconsciously passing through. Years ago, when people started using video cameras in department stores, it was always a startling effect to see one’s own image played back on a dozen television screens. The same effect is here, magnified a hundred times. Not only is there that strange feeling one gets to see a moment in their lives occurring on a screen while they’re watching their real life unfold, there is also that uneasiness that comes when a thousand people are observing.
The observing is the most powerful thing about these live projections. It does give a sense that one is no longer living a moment in isolation, where private moments of contemplation during the day end with moments of contemplation in a New York City hotel room before retiring. Instead, it’s the sense of being observed, as well as participating in the mass observation of moments in time. On the one hand, it’s a reminder that this is a community, and even though there are millions, the small details of a day are important enough for video.
At the same time, there are those who wonder about the wisdom of so much video in New York , where the cameras can be used to watch people and monitor behavior. Since the surveillance cameras started showing up everywhere, and there are thousands, it has increased an uneasy feeling of being watched all the time. But even the best video camera can’t keep up, ultimately, with the pace of time itself, and New Yorkers are famously fast walkers, and it’s only a blink before they’ve escaped the frame once again.
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