lost & found?

Some people’s gains are other people’s losses.

I am now almost half way through “The Classifieds” project. On one level, I see this project as a reflection of the anonymity of online social media interaction and an experiment in what draws people to follow a digital trail of breadcrumbs. In some ways this project has very little to do with the final videos produced for this series. Instead it is about discovering what people want reveal in a public forum or what they want to communicate to strangers. For instance, “lost & found”, produced for May, was inspired by a classified ad about a lost gold ring. The catch however, was that the ring was lost over 10 years ago. I imagine a story behind the ad: a portrait of an older man, remembering the moment of his loss; the haunting emotional tug of a personal memento; the tiny hopefulness of his posting.

Naturally this month’s video was posted under the Lost & Found section of the classifieds with no more of an explanation other than “lost and found”. For the first posting of the month, the ad contained a video still. The second round of posting eliminated the photograph and only included a QR code linking the ad to the vidoodles mobile website and the brief description: “some people’s gains are other people’s losses.” For some reason this particular ad was removed and blocked on numerous occasions so we only received 33 page views with 2 unique visits from Washington and Colorado, and 1 visitor from Copenhagen, Denmark.