COURTESY OF NARRATIVE CLIP
Exit
mind by creating an all-remembering storage device Bush dubbed the
“memex.” A person would create
this “enlarged intimate supplement
to his memory” by feeding it books,
letters, records and the images
captured by an unusual camera.
Bush predicted the “camera hound
of the future” would supplement
memory by attaching to his forehead a camera only “a little larger
than a walnut.” He was off only by
the size: Narrative Clip is smaller
than a walnut, though its creators
do suggest strapping it to a headband. (This isn’t fantastic news for
anyone who cares about their privacy. Like Google Glass, the Narrative Clip also enables stranger-onstranger surveillance that, short of
banning the technology or strictly
limiting its uses, could be impossible to suppress as the device’s
popularity grows.)
At the end of a week, my Narrative Clip had assembled a photographic “memex” that offers the
closest thing yet to a time machine. The Narrative app divvies
my photos into albums that transport me to a specific time — my
car ride Saturday, Feb. 1 at 12:46
p.m., for example — for a taste of
who I was and what I was doing at
that precise moment in the past.
TECH
HUFFINGTON
02.23.14
The Narrative Clip taps
into a related, but oddly
contradictory, impulse:
a zeal for subjecting
ourselves to ceaseless
surveillance, provided
we’re in charge of the data.”
None of my Clip snaps have made
it to Instagram, nor have I bothered to weed out the bad ones. The
pleasure, as Källström envisioned,
comes from replaying a stop-action
animation of an unremarkable, totally average day. Looking through
my albums, the only remarkable
thing that emerges is how much I’d
give to see the same kind of photos
taken during an average day when I
was 4, or 16, or even 26.
But then there were the things
I couldn’t place, like the bizarre
looks from unknown individuals,
or the bookshelf in my apartment
that, seen from a new angle, suddenly looked sadly shabby.
The Narrative Clip didn’t just