Back in October 2002 I posted an intellectually interesting (I thought) piece about recontextualising past events (pre the advent of the web) through the eyes of a webcam. This notion predated things like cameraphones and Flickr and the idea that millions of people are now collecting photographs and images every day of events both trivial and important.

Anyway I really liked the effect of seeing history through modern eyes and back in 2002 I made up a handful of examples of what I was thinking to illustrate the the concept. These low quality, blurry images were intended to be simulations of co-incidental or accidental glimpses of the moments leading up to, or after the moment of the event itself, rather than perfectly composed photographs of the actual events happening.

Like a boring, otherwise ordinary mid-morning shot of a bland section of the Berlin Wall a couple of weeks after it's construction was completed, a partial glimpse of the Kennedy motorcade on its way to Dealey Plaza or a lone Allied tank driving through an anonymous Parisien street, hours after the liberation of Paris. The idea being a webcam sits pointing in the same direction all the time, unguided by human interest.

Lately Adam Curry has been talking about something similar, some way of harnessing together various individual perspectives on events, in the same vein as a documentary I saw a couple of years back about 9/11 where various ordinary New Yorkers had recorded rough and ready home movies from their apartment buildings on their camcorders, barely seconds after the planes hit the towers.

I vividly recall the moment I heard about the Challenger disaster, twenty years ago today. This is my tribute.