Time Lapses: Ageing Backwards

Sam Klemke recording his life. Image Source: Hypervocal.

Yahoo News has a special interest story running about Sam Klemke, a 55-year-old caricature artist, who has been filming himself every year for 35 years.  He has put together a (now viral) Youtube video, wherein he ages backwards over that time. As he moves backwards, the technology gets worse and worse too; given the connection he draws between video and time, the degradation of the tech constitutes an implicit subplot in this man's life.  It's another illustration of the weird confluence in our era between empiricism and gnosticism.  We believe that our technology can somehow function as an objective observer, and capture the real essence of ourselves, freed from the confines of time - thereby showing us a higher truth.  Good luck with that one. From the Yahoo report:

Sam Klemke began filming himself 35 years ago long before the term vlogger even existed using Super 8 film and a separate audio recorder because his camera couldn't record sound.

He hoped that one day he would have the technology to merge the video and audio. He has been recording himself every year for the last 35 years, and last month he posted the edited clips in a single video that shows his life backwards.

The video has gone viral, racking up nearly 700,000 views online. Klemke now finds himself doing interviews with stations all over the world. He is even being called the first vlogger by some.

"I've always had this fascination that you could capture time with a movie camera," he says to KVAL News. "I remember being fascinated that you could look at a film with Jimmy Stewart in the 70s. And then you could also look at one of him in the 30s and you could see, oh my God, you could see a 40-year span of his life right before your eyes with two separate movies."

See the video below the jump.

Video Source: Youtube. Video © Sam Klemke.

For my other posts on Time Lapses go here, here, here, here, here and here.

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