Movies like Babylon work toward the creation of a chain of causality by linking together events happening in different places and times. What if, instead, the linkage is of events happening in the same moment? Imagine, say, a project that collects video footage from the same minute of the same day from around the world, then splices these together..or has them playing simultaneously in a grid, as in 6 billion others.
This inspiration for this from a chance obersvation - from the Zitadelle Petersberg - of a statuesque woman perched on heels shedding her clothing then walking, with hula hoop, across the plaza where teens skateboarded, tourists peered down at the red-tiled roofs of Erfurt below, and a sudden tittering from tourists like me at the next table gave an alert of something non-ordinary going on below. Earlier in the day I'd passed the site of a synagogue destroyed on Kristallnacht. The profoundly different quality of these nearby (yet temporally different) events got me wondering " What else is going on around the world as I sit in relative safety watching a naked woman in a public space?" For example this testimony given as a relentless plume of oil - at the time estimated at 20,000 to 40,000 barrels per day - billowed up from a puncture in the ocean floor. Or picture 4 from here showing Afghan boys doing wrestling training - though picture 2 of the burning oil tanker might have been taken just as easily on the same day.
Turned into a project: The presentation could range from between the extremes of documentary footage - perhaps displayed as a grid of 100 randomly-selected inputs of surveillance video - to an auteur selecting - then editing - a melange of footage collected from a team of videographers assigned to significant locations around the Earth - i.e. the former being a random collection, the latter a staged collection. The point? Since it's easiest to fall back into thinking locally (in our own locale of experience), thinks that get us into a global perspective are pretty fasinating.
This is what a lot of organizations cash in on. Most of us would probably like to help someone in drought-stricken Africa have access to potable water, but we're not quite sure how to go abut it. Or we don't trust (and can't verify) that the money we cough off actually does any good, or that the agency is less than reputable. This mistrust is often justifed. Take, for example, Live Earth 2010, "which was built upon the belief that entertainment has the power to transcend social and cultural barriers to move the world community to action. The goal of the organization is to raise money to help finance water projects in developing countries." But...wait a minute...who's the sponsor? Dow Chemical! Hmm. Don't they own Union Carbide - you know, the Bhopal Disaster people? And don't they have 96 superfund sites in the US? What the f*** are they doing sponsoring a clean water running event?!
If I run this event again next year I'll do it carrying 10kg or so of water - to get the real feel of how it feels to someone who has to walk the distance every day. And perhaps without clothing - to get the feel of the woman in Erfurt.
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