It’s probably not strictly a still-life. Pick a bunch of locations to film dérives. Main criteria for the locations is spaces that may not have high visibility but coexist in urban spaces as fixtures of their human communities that don’t strictly interlock with capitalist systems.
Concepts to play with:
Is this a counter-example? A compilation of all the Stompers. I mention it cuz our neighbor painted two of them, which is cool! But I think it’s a counter-example because they are explicitly visible.
how so? what are stompers?
oh! they’re the elephant mascot of the oakland A’s, the baseball team. i think Stomper is really weird-looking, and didn’t like most of the statues of them i’d seen around, but then learned they’re all decorated by oakland-based artists and then thought it was kinda cool, and then learned our neighbor was asked to decorate two.
they’re meant to be seen as in they’re literally propaganda ^^
I dont think low visibility is a hard req. So a spin: an unplanned (filmed) exploration of the locations that stompers are at, foot traffic, how the functional use and geometry of the space they’re placed in create a 3rd space & stimulate or inhibit public interaction. The core idea being: Intentional decisions went into placing the statues at locations likely based on factors including visibility. The dérive is perhaps sampling how stomper impact does or doesnt validate stomper intent.
I think I’ll have something to contribute in the spirit. We walk around a lot, and have a lot of mental maps of Oakland that often surprised motorists.
Oh, this is a good place to share an experience that is new to me: strangers finding me and apologizing for shouting at me from their vehicle.
Specifically, parents of children at our public school. They see our family walking around, and have this impulse to offer us a ride; unfortunately, they often spot us in the middle of traffic/intersection, or have a child yell at us from the back window. And then they “trap” me in the halls at school, where I am not allowed to run away because there is no running in the halls…
As my general policy contains the clause, “don’t let people distract you from surviving cars”, I ignore them. As I remind each of them in turn, “I don’t respond to strangers shouting at me from their cars”.
That is a fascinating thing I’ve observed, but I am reminded of it now as they often also include some weird praise for walking the kid to school, admit they could never do it, or anything, without a car, and they wonder how we do it, even though we often show up across town before they do, on foot…
I just smirk, because motorists don’t know that Oakland is covered in wild walks and hidden staircases and library boxes! We habitually walk next to turkeys. Literal turkeys. They shout at tech workers lining up for the bus and block traffic, so they are doing their part!
I also just smirk because I don’t know how to handle the confessions of people that obviously want human interaction so much they’d scream from a moving vehicle at a complete stranger… it isn’t really my place to apologize, so following in line with my plan to model the awesome reality for others, I’d say documenting the weird and wonderful stomper-space of Oakland would be an appropriate guide/response. 
When I think of public spaces I like to think about a very generalized notion of giving and taking. Conversations like so many other organic things are feedback loops. If I show up to a concert and just decide to be an asshole and push people (outside the confines of the mosh pit) or less drastically, am using the show for social capital in that scene, talking more than listening about my experiences with music then I’m entering the loop, perhaps giving a little by ways of financial support, but overall im just taking.
but if I’m sharing cigs or whatever (an example, i dont usually own cigarettes), lookig out for folks who might need help at the rave, and make conversation with other fans-listening more than i talk- I’m taking but I’m also giving more. the nightclub as a community space. the community as church. church as an ecosystem.
The unseen is only one part of what makes the dérive’s unstructured nature “revolutionary.” Theres another component that can be defined neatly as the interactions between actors in a system, which sounds fancier than “people doing things in a place that affect other people.”
So when I read about
I read an intent to give a helping hand by means of a ride. Perhaps theres some implication of asking you that that they (and/or I) don’t understand but the stranger-stranger connection is 𝓆𝓊𝒾𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓈𝓈𝑒𝓃𝓉𝒾𝒶𝓁 human interaction. To each their own ofc but the unseen and the stranger-interaction patterns are both so important to the unstructured/random-arrival-pattern nature of community and both are what these videos will hope to capture.
Put another way, lonely is a feeling but its named wrong because it sounds like a state of being.
Expressing that feeling is perhaps a way of dispelling it and, at scale, with nurturing, can be a motivator for creating better communities. Capturing those expressions of loneliness, those brief and random arrivals of strangers into your life, can perhaps then forge a blueprint of interactions that goes hand in hand with the blueprints of power structure and physical structure. Thank you for sharing those experiences! The dice roll outcomes end up mattering more than their probability distributions ever could.
unrelated but same with:
with the caveat that I too can get really weary and wary of shallow reactions like this. They’re hoping smalltalk is giving and indicates listening. Does it? I don’t particularly care to deconstruct smalltalk (although be my guest if thats your jam).