One day, 24 hours. You could break down these units even further into seconds, milliseconds and so forth. One might consider a day in terms of the Earth’s rotation, the time our planet takes to spin once on its axis, the Sun rising and setting, but then of course there’s also the night, and it isn’t until you combine day and night that you get a temporal reference.
Then again, you could try to register all the things that can be done in a single day. The Earth was created in six, and it’s said that Rome wasn’t built in a single day either. You could take a look at the amount of resources consumed in a single day or, for that matter, the quantity of such material produced in a day. On YouTube, for example, an hour of content is uploaded every second, which adds up to 3,600 days of content made available in 24 hours.
Then, you could give some thought to how it’s possible to manage such enormous quantities of data, since YouTube is only a part of the puzzle here. That just what George Church and Sriram Kosuri do in their attempt to store digital data in our DNA.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VCqLGaaleQ&hd=1&w=585]
“One Day on Earth,” on the other hand, deals with the human inhabitants of this planet, what their days look like, what they do during them. For the third time now, Kyle Ruddick and his crew are calling upon thousands of people around the globe to send their own personal communiqués to the world on December 12, 2012, to become part of a giant film project spotlighting thousands of different aspects of our societies and our fellow human beings.
Athttp://www.onedayonearth.org, you can register to participate in this project. You can shoot your footage completely on your own, you can prepare a script in advance, film spontaneously—aboard a trolley car, for instance—or work together with a cast and crew to capture what you happen to be thinking at the moment. There are no stylistic requirements; each film ought to be a personal expression.
If it’s equipment, inspiration or company you lack, then you can head to the Ars Electronica Center and work on a joint project with others. Beginning at 9 AM, we’ll make available cameras you can use to give free rein to your creativity, and when you’re done there are plenty of computers to upload your efforts to the “One Day on Earth” website. Come sundown, last year’s film will be screened in Deep Space, so you’ll already be able to get a strong impression of the context in which your own sequence will be seen.