Kantonen Pekka: Three Times a Decade
Three Times a Decade is a media art project in the form of a video blog in Youtube, and a study about art practice in Internet. It is based on my family video diary I have kept since March 1990. The project will start on the date the video will turn 30 years. On March 13th I will start publishing a video blog with three video diary clips from the years 1990, 2000, and 2020 with a commentary. I will publish the video blog on a daily basis for ten years. I will thus create three parallel video timelines that the public can follow and comment. One decade, 2010s, will not be seen.
My conference paper will be a report based on the experiences of the first five months of the project. In this early report my research questions are concerned with the importance of the medium, and the historicalness of the video material. The video diary has been exhibited before as installations, and performances. How does the social media context change the meaning and the reception of the representation of everyday? In my doctoral thesis Generational Filming, a video diary as experimental and participatory research (2017), I studied the direct feedback of the video diary screenings. Now there will be a virtual audience, whose comments will be included both in the artwork and in the research. The oldest video clips are thirty years old, from the analogical time before the internet. Three Times a Decade will become a microhistory of the internet era as a video blog that unfolds in realtime/screentime.