As promised, second take on an everyday experience would be done in yet another popular kind of media - video. This attempt is not as extensive as the previous one (IF "extensive" is even the right word to describe it) due to some technical difficulties cause by my bloody memory card being stuck inside the camera (could not transfer the files back to my PC or clear the card out to shoot more footage), but hey, I work with the tools I've at my disposal. :)
These videos, shot the day after, deal not with my work (thank whatever Gods are there), but with a regular day of a university student. Less of my everyday activities are covered (I needed both hands most of the time), yet I'm glad to share some of the views I lay my eyes upon most of the week.
Moving straight to the point, I do have a feeling that video is tremendously better way to pass the experience on that still picture, mostly on the account of portraying the main thing that still image cannot grasp - movement. With the movement come all the dynamic subtleties, little details that create most of the experience. Take an example. A mashed-up group of people in front of... up to 5 blokes, all of them in weird poses. How an you differ between a bar brawl, mosh-pit and traditional folklore dance? First clue, what kind of music in the background. Still image has no such information, most of the videos have audio track as well. Second clue, watch the movements. Are they chaotic or organized? Full-blown chaos, people ferociously swinging their limbs around - that's probably a bar brawl. Everyone's smiling, limb swinging looks more careless that malicious? We're in a middle of a mosh-pit (yes, I know there's hardcore moshing and body slamming, buy Oi! I'm trying to make a point here). Again, this kind of detail needs to be experience as a whole, not with just one frame, taken of out context. That's another feat video has as a media - the context. Still images often need explanation on the conditions during the shooting, the location, often the focus of a photo itself, it can rarely exist on its own (at least if its purpouse is not to be open to interpretation, artistic photography is exempt from that rule). "Moving pictures", on the other hand, often contain enough data to exist purely on their own, without additional data. End-user's mind can start patterning the information and evoking the experience without being constantly pulled away for clarification.
Video still feels little bit out of the place. Although much better at creating the feeling of "being there" than several other types of media, it is too vicarious, not intuitive enough. Why is that? Why does video resembles scrying more than participating?
To answer this question, we need to ask ourselves another one - where does experience take the place? In my opinion, experience is not tangible for it is a mind construct, not the actual occurence. All sensual factors, including (but definitely not limiting to) our basic senses, as well as spatial and rational awareness, social perception and numerous other variables, are influenced by whatever's in our minds. Such union of perception and rationalization is what we call experience.
How does it relate to video? In my opinion, it seems TOO descriptive. It usually focuses on the main subject of whatever's being filmed. It's straight to the point - a lot of subtleties are still kept "off-screen", keeping the whole creation too artifical to evoke any kind of experience, yet at the same time, there's enough information in focus to keep us from wondering about all the nooks and crannies not caught on tape. Video provides decent stimuli, but fails to awake the analyzing parts of our brains. Still, a note should be kept, I don't want to generalize - there are many great recordings that succeed in such task, but again, key lies in proper video manipulation (quick cuts, exotic camera angles and similar) and most of the tricks are based on NOT showing something to the viewer, leaving them wondering.
Video is a powerful media platform, capable of evoking strong experience - it needs extensive skills however, else we end up with yet another amateur-shot wedding scene (everyone forced at least once in their lives to watch wedding footage know the suffering).
And for all masochists out there, a YouTube playlist containing the video footage. Don't expect HD-class quality, I've only had a digital camera to record it:
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