This is a new era. A new time. A new day. And even a new story.
The Whale Hunt is an experiment in human storytelling.
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Jonathon Harris spent 9 days in Alaska living with a family of Eskimos. Along with a friend who acts as his photographer their entire journey is documented in 3,214 images.
[9 days x 24 hours x 60 mins]/3214 images = 4 pictures per minute
Instead of going through and selecting only his favorites he created a website and sequenced every image.
The purpose of this project was threefold:
First, to experiment with a new interface for human storytelling. The photographs are presented in a framework that tells the moment-to-moment story of the whale hunt. The full sequence of images is represented as a medical heartbeat graph along the bottom edge of the screen, its magnitude at each point indicating the photographic frequency (and thus the level of excitement) at that moment in time. A series of filters can be used to restrict this heartbeat timeline, isolating the many sub stories occurring within the larger narrative (the story of blood, the story of the captain, the story of the arctic ocean, etc.). Each viewer will experience the whale hunt narrative differently, and not necessarily in a linear fashion, constructing his or her own understanding of the experience.
Second, to subject myself to the same sort of incessant automated data collection process that I usually write computer programs to conduct (in previous projects like We Feel Fine, Lovelines, Universe, 10×10, and Phylotaxis). Much effort is spent making computers understand what it’s like to be human (through data mining and artificial intelligence), but rarely do humans try to see things from a computer’s perspective. I was interested in reaching some degree of empathy with the computer, a constant thankless helper in my work.
Third, to take an epic personal experience from the physical world and translate it optimally to the Internet, so that many people can share it.
The final outcome, a success. A Whale Hunt is a prime example of a new way to tell stories. Like yesterdays Adage.com said “stories we create and consume are no longer defined by time, space or material object.”
