Exit
pinhead-shaped lens in the corner of its white plastic frame.
That black spot is the only vague
hint it’s something more sinister
than a pretty pin. From its rotating perch, my personal paparazzo
has followed me to brunch, the
office, dinners, two concerts, a
baby shower, a television appearance, and even, by accident, to the
bathroom. It stops shooting only
when I slip it in my pocket.
If you’re anything like my
friends, whose distaste for my
surveillance binge I’ve captured
on camera in frowns and furrowed
brows, what you’re really wondering by now is, “Why?” Why be a
creepy Tracking Tom who photographs strangers twice a minute?
And why bother capturing such
scintillating still-lives as the inside of a fridge?
Yet if you’re anything like the
nearly 3,000 individuals who
funded the Narrative Clip’s Kickstarter campaign, or the thousands more who’ve embraced
“lifelogging” with tools like the
FitBit, the appeal is obvious. Our
memories are scattered, untrustworthy little things constantly
misplacing important details from
our lives. Computers, on the other
hand, boast infinite brainpower
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HUFFINGTON
02.23.14
and a knack for tracking everything we do — one that gets better by the day. While people decry
Big Brother-esque scrutiny amid
disclosures of NSA spying and the
spread of security cameras, the
Narrative Clip taps into a related,
Why be a creepy Tracking
Tom who photographs
strangers twice a minute?
And why bother capturing
such scintillating still-lives
as the inside of a fridge?”
but oddly contradictory, impulse:
a zeal for subjecting ourselves to
ceaseless surveillance, provided
we’re in charge of the data.
The camera indulges a longstanding desire for technologyen abled total recall, an obsession
that’s transforming the act of
forgetting from an inevitable outcome into something that requires
an active choice. Yet even more
than expanding my memories, I
found my own camera companion
was actually creating new ones.
Martin Källström, the co-founder
of Narrative, says his own glitchy
cerebral cortex inspired the minicamera. While birthdays and holi-