Waitaminute.tv is a window on life. It is also a way of life if you but let it be.  And if you let it be, you may just find the magical in the seemingly mundane.

“Every place is a gold mine.  You have only to give yourself time, sit in a teahouse watching the passersby, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread–a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you just met–and soon the most insipid, most insiginficant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theater of humanity.”

–TIZIANO TERZANI

How often do we race past this minute onto the next?  But…hold on a sec, hang for a moment, waitaminute. That is life we are racing past and wishing away. Minutes may be grains of sand in an hour glass but they have a way of adding up. Maybe they add up annoyingly like parking tickets or maybe they add up magnificently like bricks in the Great Wall of China.

As Terzani suggests, let the “insignificant” transform before your very eyes. Yes, roses have a fragrance.

 

The website www.waitaminute.tv  is launched and its content will grow over time. Here an interview that let´s you know a bit more about the project and the idea behind it…

Time Magazine: Hello Ole. I would like to begin by taking the first minute to ask you to explain the general idea behind this project. So, what exactly is waitaminute.tv?

Ole Ukena: It´s a mix of a video blog, an experimental documentary channel, and an ever-growing art piece. As a change of pace from the speedier editing techniques surrounding the MTV generation, I also consider it an invitation to “meditate”. The general idea is pretty simple. I choose a minute of real life, frame it, capture it and then, without editing it, upload the scene to waitaminute.tv. It may even be a boring form of entertainment at times. But at its best, and this is why I like it, a seemingly insignificant minute can transform…a poetic travel diary, an absurd random occurrence, a surprising glance into everyday beauty, or some strange cultural phenomenon…Essentially a collaborative media platform for filmmakers. Now was that already a minute or how many seconds do I have left?

TM: (laughing) Good one. So what makes a minute special? That is, why waitaminute.tv and not waitanhour.tv? Why did you decide to “watch life 60 seconds at a time?”

OU: To me, one minute seems like the obvious choice. Initially I experimented with different time formats. Personal experience and various test runs with viewers led me to conclude that 60 seconds is the right length. At times it gently requests the watcher to patiently stay with it. If it were any longer, that request would be unreasonable. But 60 seconds shouldn’t be too taxing…

TM: I see. Well that begs the question, how did you get the idea?

OU: I think I have always been fascinated by the possibility of changing perspective–HOW one sees things. Something very common can become something very poetic if you leave space for the poetry to unfold. I think we get caught up in perceiving every object through a grey bearded army of judgments. I really like simplicity and anything that challenges conditioned mindsets. Art at its best does exactly that.

TM: So more specifically, how does waitaminute relate to your view of art?

OU: I find myself more and more bombarded with information, and stimuli from every direction, everyday. For a little relief, I try to build myself little islands of stillness. Conscious breathing, not thinking, just watching. Art can be a good excuse to escape the information overload and take a step back to observe without judgment. Waitaminute specifically seeks to provide the viewer this kind of island of stillness.

TM: Little islands of stillness?

OU: It happens to me almost automatically when I am in the creative space while drawing or making music. With photography, it also happens sometimes but there’s usually more mind movement, like was the picture good? How should I shoot the next one? And so on. With this project, I force myself to make a decision and then just stay with it, really paying attention to every single layer of information that the situation contains. It’s good training for de-conditioning. Ultimately I hope to make a tiny contribution towards slowing down the pace of life and falling into the beauty of life’s little moments.

TM: In the process of capturing something, how do you decide what is worth a minute and what is not?

OU: That’s a good question and the truth is that I am still in the process of finding out. For me, the moment’s intuition plays a large role. At the same time though, there is a quick “analysis” of potential prior to pushing the record button. Sometimes, I just take a chance because, really, what is the risk? But in many instances, I find that something that doesn’t seem worth a minute’s look transforms. It is something you wouldn’t otherwise look at but it has it’s own fascination if you give it a chance. It becomes about HOW you look at something rather than WHAT you look at.

TM: Wouldn’t a picture capture the gist of the moment?

OU: One recurring question that accompanies this kind of exercise is whether a moment in front of the lens is more appropriately captured in video or photograph, sure. Since I am also a photographer I deal with this decision constantly. This is one of the reasons I work with the Canon 5d mark II–I always have the access to both possibilities. But when I decide on video rather than a picture it is always because there is a need to capture time’s passage, which a picture clearly can’t address.

TM: All the scenes are recorded with tripod? Why?

OU: One of the ideas is that you make a choice to look at something and then stay with it. If the camera were moving, you would be making a new choice with every camera movement. The mind finds things more interesting if you keep moving. That’s exactly the trap waitaminute.tv attempts to overcome. It finds the interesting in simply keeping still and focusing the attention on what is happening inside the frame. Like looking at a candle or a set of waves coming in without changing position. Just sitting and watching. Easy as that.

TM: The waves make me think–I could imagine patterns developing in your work and in conjunction with the submissions you receive…

OU: As waitaminute.tv is an evolving media library of increasing size, patterns will develop, for sure, and I expect various series will come out of that. I started for example to film people sleeping and that is turning into a series of its own called “sleeping beauty.“ A similar occurrence happened with moving shadows and rhythmic patterns. I enjoy experimenting to see what keeps me really interested and which pieces seem to evolve into something more. As this is a work in progress, it’s future direction remains flexible.

TM: It seems like an individual’s relationship to time plays a central role in this project?

OU: I would go so far as to say one of the primary motivations of this project is to lead people to question, become aware, of their own relationship with time. With this website, I invite them to have a focused relationship with the present moment. What I look to do when I am shooting is set aside a constant tendency to analyze and categorize. I find a natural tendency to divide everything into interesting and boring or serious and silly or beautiful and ugly…With this project I encourage visitors to the site to just sit and watch life quietly unfold.

We all know how relative the perception of time can be. When I was 5 or 6, the minute before I was allowed to open Christmas gifts seemed like a whole lifetime! Kissing a girl for a minute passed within the blink of an eye. Sadly (laughing). On a larger scale, when my birthday (in late June) was over and I had to wait until Christmas for presents to roll around again, half a year seemed like an eternity. And now, when I look back at the past 5 years I am astonished at how quickly the time passed. I think all of us have experienced this ethereal quality to time. It’s amazing how subjective it is.

TM: Why did you choose the internet platform?

OU: It’s actually a pretty logical choice. It doesn’t just reach video art nerds at festivals and galleries. Those guys are already trained to watch videos that challenge patience. The net opens up distribution to just about everybody.

It also is the most competitive of marketplaces, where one has an unbelievable choice of information always available and just one click away. People might have 4 tabs open in their browser, reading email, checking Facebook, worrying about their bank balance and getting sports news, while checking which Skype contacts are online. In the next instant, they of course are finishing up a blog entry. Multitasking and information overload is the internet’s most obvious byproduct. So I think it’s great to put it right there and see what happens.

TM: Which countries are featured so far? What other countries are you planning on integrating?

OU: Mostly Asian countries like Thailand, Laos and India because this idea emerged when I was working in Southeast Asia. Content from Berlin will now play a big role since I am typically based there during the summer. Through my work with the CRE8 Foundation I will likely continue the focus on Asia. But in the near future, Central & South America are planned. I also plan to invite filmmaker friends and video artists to contribute which will open it up geographically.

TM: Are there minutes that you don’t put up?

OU: Some stuff ends up on the cutting room floor!

TM: Wait a second, let me just check my notes here as we wrap this up.

OU: No, wait a minute, you mean.

TM: Are you mocking me?

OU: Nah…(laughing)