|
|
|
|
|
|
The idea is that once a month, you take a photo of yourself and post it with a very brief summary of what happened to you that month. The idea is that, over time, you see how you've subtly changed and have a very simple chronology of when things happened in your life. The idea is subtlety, brevity, the long-term.
A month seems like an ideal time because people don't change much day to day, but they might change their clothing style or get a tattoo or change their hair month to month. A year seems more appropos as more data is collected on a person.
It fascinates me to study how people develop and when they develop. When they enter different phases of their life, the "liminality" that my grandfather wrote about (@ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality ).
The template would allow people to customize colors and styles easily. It would turn into "the Wuntsah idea", I'd hope. Where people would be like, "I'm so gonna Wuntsah this." It'd be easy to post to. Just go to a page, press "new entry" or something, then link to the photo from your hard drive or flickr or whatever, then enter in the blurb.
The name is open-ended so if people wanted to just do it once a month or once a year or even once a day, they could.
My thinking is that for the bigger picture, Wuntsah could be part of someone's profile page that you see the first time you look someone up on the site. This goes back to my hating that there's not a broad overview or profile of someone on most social community sites.
First, view the database blue/orange demo (most up-to-date),
blue/orange demo, or the purple demo.
Track your personal, social, and physical growth visually through periodic photos, using whichever frequency (wuntsah day, wuntsah month, wuntsah year, whatever) you feel most comfortable with.
It might help to see doing this for yourself as a work of art than as contributing to a social site or blog. This is a record of your life. High-definition photos are best. Also, unlike other time-lapse projects, I believe the setting is important for a photo. Instead of just a headshot that shows how the body ages over time, I believe clothing style, the photo's background (work, vacation), and little clues like wedding rings or new tattoos are important to establishing an interesting Wuntsah timeline.
Take a look at Ryo Koyama's comparison page of his family, where he has photos of 9 different people, most from their early photo-addled years to their 40's. The format lets you see how they look now compared to when they were toddlers.
This is highly subjective, but in my (Ben's) opinion, taking photos daily will not be very interesting until you have a lot of photos which could be used to create, for example, a large portrait made up of a lot of photos. Taking photos monthly is the ideal period of time because it will show the shortest noticeable changes through hair color, hair style, tan, prominent setting, etc.
That said, we do not want to impede on your creativity by limiting what you can do. If you want to take photos every five minutes, then have at it!!! =)
Regularity is important for building a durable Wuntsah. Even if you don't post to your Wuntsah, you can take a photo and save it for later.
By adding a short blurb that mentions the prominent events that happened to you during that time period, the photo gains context and the qualities of a diary without taking on the burden of updating or upkeep.
I want everyone to Wuntsah. I don't care what peoples' Wuntsahs look
like and I want people to Wuntsah how they want to. So if you want to
make your own templates and modify my default Wuntsahs, please feel free.
![[ demo of default style ]](style_default.jpg "[ demo of default style ]")
My aim was to place no limits on how people developed their own Wuntsahs;
I just wanted to throw the idea out there so that we could begin as
a group to track our life progress anthropologically and in a digestable,
somewhat standard format.
All I ask for is that you consider letting me post or link to your work on my site. Also, if you make it so that others may use your templates, that would assist in the creative spread of functional, beautiful Wuntsahs.
