Idiot continues to take daily self-portrait for 16 yrs despite better projects, longer projects, more popular projects, his face from JK Keller on Vimeo.
Yesterday I got my first high school reunion invitation, which has the combined effect of making me feel both young and old. It’s kind of how I imagine JK Keller feels when he dives back into The Adaption to My Generation, an ongoing daily photo project that sees the artist creating one self-portrait per day—”until he dies,” as the Daily Mail so lightly put it back in 2010.
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Published on Vimeo with the title, “Idiot continues to take daily self-portrait for 16 yrs despite better projects, longer projects, more popular projects, his face,” Living My Life Faster is the latest video result of his efforts. In three minutes and 25 seconds, Keller, who most recently released super-psychedelic “remasters” of Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and other classic TV shows, travels from 1998 to 2014 in a stunning image stream set against a white backdrop (like Karl Baden’s Every Day project), making it at once more uniform than Noah Kalina’s daily selfie videos (thanks to Adobe After Effects’ Image Stabilization Plugin), and featuring a more dramatic change-over-time than Dan Hanna’s. The soundtrack, which Keller explains “is derived from a black midi version of ‘Night of (K)Nights’” gives his piece a frenetic energy that tempers the blank expression he keeps consistent throughout the years. “I want the images to be as ‘subtly objective’ as possible,” Keller explains on his FAQs page, I like to be able to extract a specific feeling from what should be an expressionless face. There are days when you can see a lot from the way the muscles are situated in the face. Granted, it is next to impossible to see these things when the images are so small, but trust that they are there.”
Read about the auto-following selfie drone of the future here.
When he first shared the video on YouTube last October, Keller wrote, “well… 16 years I guess,” which is similar to how I feel about the time since my graduation. In fact, I don’t think he’s an “idiot” at all—at least he has 5,844+ photos to show for it.
Head over to JK Keller’s page to check out more from his daily photo project, including “Average JK” images, which collapse years of photos down into ethereal individual composites, and to read his Frequently Asked Questions about The Adaption to My Generation.
GIF by Beckett Mufson, via
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