The Snake Charmer. Robots, Time, and the Future Camera.

Seoul, Korea. Standing, arm raised with a tiny camera in hand, I filmed Bourdain fall slowly beneath a clear glass of Soju. He smacked the glass down on the table and I stepped back into a wide shot, tugging at the long cable connecting my palm-sized camera to a recording deck, hidden in the shadows. The camera was no longer a single device, a box that sat on my shoulder. It had become a thing of length, long and trailing, lens at the head, recorder at the tail.

People separate themselves from the lens. They put the camera on a tripod and step back. They place it on a jib, a robotic arm, drone, satellite. As the distance from lens to operator increases, what happens in the space between?

The burden of carrying a camera’s weight is worth the great power it appears to have. It is a machine capable of trapping time. Recording breaks our perceived laws of linearity, bringing past events back to the present so we can relive, reorder, and reexamine them more clearly than memory preserves. Moments can be carried along, and passed beyond lifetimes.

The camera is a past-maker. However, the act of filming itself, to operate, is to look forward. With a camera-phone, or something professional, operating is ensuring the present’s ability to be played-back. While recording, the operator’s mind focuses on a future-past: a point where what is being gathered now, will be edited in the future as past events.

Transfixed on this future-past, the operator’s mind is split between now and later. The Present is displaced by near-present. The operator filmed the event, but is left with a peculiar feeling of not fully being there. Something has been lost. What? The act of recording blocks an operator’s access to a directly-experienced present. Life experienced through the lens is not the same as life without it. They are not fully here. The situation appears dangerous.

The camera creates a burden for the operator. Maybe it’s better if something else did the recoding. Let’s allow the camera to record autonomously; affix it to a wall, a drone, or one’s glasses. Now the operator is free to live in the present, undistracted, and still keep a record. No event is missed, the camera can roll-on continuously, autonomous.

In operating, there are two types of framing: objective and subjective. Objective framing attempts to provide the viewer with an unconscious window, while subjective draws attention back towards the operator themselves (putting the self in selfie).

Operation is action, it is choice and relation. To see through the lens and respond in a loop of feedback. Recognize a moment, choose angle and distance to it, frame it. Simple elements form a complex language of composition; line, shape, light, distance. Composition is communication; the intent to express something beyond the captured event. If the elements of composition exist in four dimensions, then there is a fifth: transmission of meaning. It is not that an event is seen, but how it is seen.

Return to the autonomous camera. Witness cameras, body cams, mapping cameras, surveillance, rolling on and collecting moments indefinitely. Life becomes increasingly played-back through the gamer’s perspective; the objective angle of the puppeteer. Without operators, subjectivity is lost. There is no filter for what, or how things are recorded, no fifth dimension. Autonomous cameras make us all editors, sorting through footage, searching for moments already lived. The present is increasingly spent trying to make sense of the past.

In Western Myth, time is a serpent: peer down its length, the tail stretches back to a dim and unreachable Past. Its head, the Present, eyes open, pushing slowly towards a dark and uncreated future.

Put autonomy to the side for a moment, and let the operator reconnect to the camera. Let the operator maintain control of the frame, but keep the lens at a distance. Operator at one end, lens at the other, robotics in-between. Robotics put cameras in environments unreachable by operators, but their main application in camerawork has been the pursuit of steadiness. Tripods and dollies evolve into Stedicams, Supertechnocranes, Russian Arms with 3-axis-gyro-stabilized heads, and all likenesses of the Movi. Ask: in this arms-race of stability, what is the endgame?

When we look around, the world appears smooth, stabilized by our organs of perception. Our obsession with stability seems logical; it is the viewer’s natural habitat. In contrast, the shakiness of a hand-held camera betrays its human operator. Hand-held is subjective, but it does not mimic the human eye. If stability and smoothness are our priority, robots will do it better.

The robotic camera allows parameters like facial recognition, or the rule of thirds. Robots move faster, smoother, and more tirelessly than a human. Their cost decreases as their complexity increases. Consider how often we repeat ourselves: the typical interview setup, the classical patterns in coverage and framing. Where repetitiveness arises, operators will be challenged by machines. If given enough parameters, will autonomous cameras film the family picnic? Monitor protests? Film a television program?

Malacca Straights, Malaysia. I had no fear of snakes. Then, filming in a village far from anti-venom, a snake-charmer poked an iron rod through the open, red skull-and-crossbones-painted lid of the box, unwittingly pinching his venomous King Cobra. Its long length suddenly arced through the air, landing wide-eyed and upright, at my feet.

Something from the past clings to cameras. There is a spookiness, an other-being-like presence, a modern superstition. People peer at the camera as something unpredictable, as if watching a snake from a safe distance. Something curious, not-yet trustworthy. Across mythology snakes were a perpetual mix of bad and good; signs of risky knowledge, dangerous medicine.

What is needed from a future camera? In the realm of objectivity, robots will advance. The efficient gathering of footage, the achievement of complicated and repeatable movements. Robots run longer hours, exact more precision, and become more expendable. Humans will have to respond with more subjectivity; their ability to uniquely connect to and communicate a moment. In this way, subjectivity becomes a future camera designer’s greatest challenge. The obstacle is the camera’s duplicitous nature: it both captures a moment, and creates a barrier to it.

How to create a more human camera? The larger the camera, the more temptation there will to put it on a variety of robotic platforms. Hence, small and light-weight is critical. The camera should have the effect of a wide lens: to draw the operator into the environment. It should permit operators to engage their subjects unencumbered. It should allow a great variety of angles, and broaden situational awareness. Robots can film from afar, humans should film up close.

As the camera body shrinks to become more maneuverable, it requires disconnecting the monitor from the camera itself. This simple act allows for a new kind of operation. The smaller camera can be in places a larger one could not, move in new ways, see new perspectives. But, critically, the operator must see what the camera sees and respond. Operating blindly is automation.

Glasses or body-mounted monitors must encourage operators to look out into the world, not at the camera. Wearable monitors and high resolution heads-up displays will become more detailed and discrete. The greater challenge will be to protect the humanity of the operator; they must see the world, but also be engaged by it.

The needed components of a powerful camera have always been in a box. Separating them into components will allow the future camera to be more ergonomic. The camera can be redesigned to fit the body’s natural form, conforming to its natural movements. If the future camera is not ergonomic, a robot will end up carrying it. Note that limiting a camera’s chip size allows it to be operated with one hand.

What remains for the future-camera designer is the seemingly unsurmountable barrier of the near-present. How can an operator be in the moment, and not lost within the camera itself?

Here, robots will be unable to help us. Beyond all the coming technological aides, the future camera operator will still find themselves alone on some street with a camera; a cobra in a box, the snake-charmer waiting for the moment it appears.