Cesar Kuriyama: One second every day

242,397 views ・ 2013-02-06

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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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So, I'm an artist.
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I live in New York, and I've been working in advertising
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for -- ever since I left school,
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so about seven, eight years now,
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and it was draining.
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I worked a lot of late nights. I worked a lot of weekends,
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and I found myself never having time for all the projects
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that I wanted to work on on my own.
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And one day I was at work and I saw a talk
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by Stefan Sagmeister on TED,
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and it was called "The power of time off,"
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and he spoke about how every seven years,
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he takes a year off from work so he could
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do his own creative projects, and I was instantly inspired,
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and I just said, "I have to do that. I have to take a year off.
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I need to take time to travel and spend time with my family
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and start my own creative ideas."
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So the first of those projects ended up being
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something I called "One Second Every Day."
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Basically I'm recording one second of every day of my life
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for the rest of my life,
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chronologically compiling these one-second
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tiny slices of my life into one single continuous video
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until, you know, I can't record them anymore.
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The purpose of this project is, one:
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I hate not remembering things that I've done in the past.
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There's all these things that I've done with my life
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that I have no recollection of
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unless someone brings it up, and sometimes I think,
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"Oh yeah, that's something that I did."
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And something that I realized early on in the project
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was that if I wasn't doing anything interesting,
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I would probably forget to record the video.
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So the day -- the first time that I forgot, it really hurt me,
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because it's something that I really wanted to --
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from the moment that I turned 30, I wanted
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to keep this project going until forever,
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and having missed that one second, I realized,
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it just kind of created this thing in my head
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where I never forgot ever again.
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So if I live to see 80 years of age,
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I'm going to have a five-hour video
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that encapsulates 50 years of my life.
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When I turn 40, I'll have a one-hour video
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that includes just my 30s.
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This has really
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invigorated me day-to-day, when I wake up,
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to try and do something interesting with my day.
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Now, one of the things that I have issues with is that,
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as the days and weeks and months go by,
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time just seems to start blurring
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and blending into each other
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and, you know, I hated that,
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and visualization is the way to trigger memory.
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You know, this project for me is a way for me
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to bridge that gap and remember everything that I've done.
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Even just this one second allows me to remember
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everything else I did that one day.
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It's difficult, sometimes, to pick that one second.
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On a good day, I'll have maybe three or four seconds
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that I really want to choose,
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but I'll just have to narrow it down to one,
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but even narrowing it down to that one allows me
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to remember the other three anyway.
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It's also kind of a protest, a personal protest,
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against the culture we have now where people
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just are at concerts with their cell phones out
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recording the whole concert, and they're disturbing you.
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They're not even enjoying the show.
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They're watching the concert through their cell phone.
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I hate that. I admittedly used to be that guy a little bit,
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back in the day, and I've decided that the best way
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for me to still capture and keep a visual memory of my life
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and not be that person, is to just record that one second
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that will allow me to trigger that memory of,
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"Yeah, that concert was amazing. I really loved that concert."
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And it just takes a quick, quick second.
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I was on a three-month road trip this summer.
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It was something that I've been dreaming about doing my whole life,
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just driving around the U.S. and Canada
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and just figuring out where to go the next day,
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and it was kind of outstanding.
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I actually ran out, I spent too much money on my road trip
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for the savings that I had to take my year off,
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so I had to, I went to Seattle and I spent some time
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with friends working on a really neat project.
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One of the reasons that I took my year off was to spend more time with my family,
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and this really tragic thing happened where
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my sister-in-law,
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her intestine suddenly strangled one day,
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and we took her to the emergency room,
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and she was, she was in really bad shape.
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We almost lost her a couple of times,
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and I was there with my brother every day.
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It helped me realize something else during this project,
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is that recording that one second on a really bad day
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is extremely difficult.
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It's not -- we tend to take our cameras out when we're doing awesome things.
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Or we're, "Oh, yeah, this party, let me take a picture."
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But we rarely do that when we're having a bad day,
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and something horrible is happening.
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And I found that it's actually been very, very important
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to record even just that one second of a really bad moment.
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It really helps you appreciate the good times.
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It's not always a good day, so when you have a bad one,
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I think it's important to remember it,
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just as much as it is important to remember the [good] days.
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Now one of the things that I do is I don't use any filters,
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I don't use anything to -- I try to capture the moment
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as much as possible as the way that I saw it with my own eyes.
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I started a rule of first person perspective.
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Early on, I think I had a couple of videos where
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you would see me in it, but I realized that wasn't the way to go.
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The way to really remember what I saw
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was to record it as I actually saw it.
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Now a couple of things that I have in my head about this project are,
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wouldn't it be interesting if thousands of people were doing this?
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I turned 31 last week, which is there.
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I think it would be interesting to see
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what everyone did with a project like this.
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I think everyone would have a different interpretation of it.
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I think everyone would benefit from just having that one second to remember every day.
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Personally, I'm tired of forgetting,
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and this is a really easy thing to do.
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I mean, we all have HD-capable cameras in our pockets right now --
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most people in this room, I bet --
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and it's something that's --
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I never want to forget another day that I've ever lived,
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and this is my way of doing that,
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and it'd be really interesting also to see,
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if you could just type in on a website,
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"June 18, 2018,"
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and you would just see a stream of people's lives
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on that particular day from all over the world.
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And I don't know, I think this project has a lot of possibilities,
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and I encourage you all to record just a small snippet of your life every day,
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so you can never forget that that day, you lived.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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