Restless spaces
I love this timelapse video from Walmart. Not sure if I can put my finger on it, but it's the same reason I find airports fascinating: in both places you can find activity at any hour of the day on any day of the year. Even if you're coming home on the red-eye, there's always someone at the airport: someone who's flight was canceled, a vendor opening or closing up shop, some folks working diligently on the cleaning crew or making building repairs.
Only in the case of Walmart, there's always someone buying or selling something in the store. Always.
It's the same with hospitals, casinos and countless other 24 hour operations. These are all spaces that never rest, they just endlessly shift between periods of more or less activity. Much like my previous post on Living Cities, watching this video one gets the sense of an animate body going through it's daily circadian rhythm. While it's easy to fixate on the cash registers, it's just as interesting to watch the capillary action in the aisles and how the lights shut off around 2am in one section of the store only to come back on around 9am.
About the video
From the post at Bernstein & Andriulli
From the post at Bernstein & Andriulli
The video comes from 24 Hours Inside Walmart by Stephen Wilkes. Stephen took a photo every 10 seconds of the day for a time-lapse video inside Walmart for Fortune magazine. All in all, 8,640 frames were taken (1,800 that are actually used) and the entire 24 hours is compressed into two minutes."The shoot took place on April 6-7, 2010 in New Brunswick, New Jersey from 9:14pm to 9:14pm. Says Photo Editor Lauren Winfield, “The inspiration was to show that Walmart never sleeps… open 24 hours with no real daylight, you have no sense of what time of day it is. We wanted to see what the traffic flow of people coming in and out of the store looks like as a day in the life.
