MIT student blogger Keri G. '10

ADITL by Keri G. '10

MIT's Technique spearheads one of the most interesting projects I've seen on campus recently.

Yesterday I carried my camera around all day and took awkward pictures of my friends.


(Hi, Sam.)

What made this different from all the other days when I carry my camera around all day and take awkward pictures of my friends and everything around me is that hundreds of other people on campus were doing the same thing with the same purpose: to take part in A Day In The Life, a project open to the entire MIT community sponsored by Technique, MIT’s yearbook and photography club. Students, faculty, and staff alike have been uploading their photos to the website, which Technique describes as a “collective photo blog” and which allows you to view timelines of multiple people’s photos at once.

Over 120 people have collectively uploaded thousands of pictures of their days so far, and it’s really interesting to see not just what people do over the course of a typical day, but also how they choose to frame that. The project made me notice the things around me all the time that I never really stopped to look at.

Like eating lunch in Stata, where seats fill up around noon and everyone moves quickly all the time.

Or the pattern of the splatter paint on the walls of my room, which I stopped noticing about two weeks after I did it.

It also gave me the opportunity to take a million pictures of the disastrous construction zone all the way down Amherst Street to the corner of Ames and Amherst (also known as WHERE I LIVE. RAWR.), because my parents do not believe me when I tell them how ridiculous it looks. The stairs to Senior House were cordoned off for over a month. Everyone was using the handicapped ramp. Delivery guys and taxi drivers keep trying to turn the wrong way down what was once a two-way street and not understanding why pedestrians and the drivers of oncoming cars keep giving them the finger.

Anyway, Check out ADITL. It’s made of awesome.

9 responses to “ADITL”

  1. Liz ('14?) says:
    September 25, 2009 at 7:39 am

    can you paint your room in all dorms/living groups at MIT?

    i love the paint splatters.

  2. Justin says:
    September 25, 2009 at 10:42 am

    @Snively: Aw. Are you feeling better now?

    Paint splatters rock, man. It’s like, beauty in randomness.

  3. Justin says:
    September 25, 2009 at 10:44 am

    Off-topic: What’s the font named? I’m writing an essay.

  4. Piper '12 says:
    September 25, 2009 at 10:52 am

    I wonder if they plan on doing this during different times of the year.

  5. Oasis '11 says:
    September 26, 2009 at 1:03 am

    What would be really cool is if they got 365 volunteers and documented every day of the year at MIT from a different angle.

    BOOYAH!

  6. VAL ('14?) says:
    September 26, 2009 at 8:09 am

    Nifty! Thanks for sharing. smile

  7. Snively says:
    September 25, 2009 at 8:56 am

    I was really looking forward to this, and then I got quarantined. My four pictures are like, a picture of a flu mask, a picture outside my window, a picture of my wall, and a picture of a hamburger. :(

  8. Lainers '12 says:
    September 29, 2009 at 4:14 am

    This would have been exactly my thing. Except I lost my camera for four days, and this day managed to be in that set. And then it was in my backpack the whole time. Which I found very irksome.

  9. lilikindsli says:
    October 4, 2009 at 8:33 am

    AXlZ6v I want to say – thank you for this!