The Great Whale Hunt

The Great Whale Hunt is a truly amazing interactive experience. It's a new way to take pictures and a fantastic way of telling a story. It is extremely technologically saavy and a captivating way to document an experience online. It will take you on a pretty amazing experience recorded with great and carefully organized. The website allows you to experience a whale hunt as if you were on the expedition as it occurred over 9 days hunting with Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow Alaska. 3,214 photos were taken.

One of the techniques Jason Harris (the creator) used enables the rate of photographs taken to match the excitment of the photographer so the experience can be accurately portrayed to the viewer; "the photographs were taken at five-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeat”. In moments of high adrenaline, this photographic heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 37 pictures in five minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of my own heartbeat."

Harris described one of the objectives of this adventure "as a way to subject himself to the same sort of incessant automated data collection process that he usually writes computer programs to conduct (in previous projects like We Feel Fine, Lovelines, Universe, 10x10, and Phylotaxis). Much effort is spent making computers understand what it’s like to be human (through data mining and artificial intelligence), but rarely do humans try to see things from a computer’s perspective. He was interested in reaching some degree of empathy with the computer, a constant thankless helper in my work."

The photos and the way you interact with them are certainly worth a look.