The moment was captured.
The moment is gone.
In a moment, you will see yourself.
For twenty seconds, simply look. At your face. At the screen. At the strange loop of watching yourself watch yourself.
A photograph will be taken. You won't know when.
This requires camera access.
be here
The moment was captured.
The moment is gone.
You may close this window.
This piece requires a camera to experience.
You just experienced twenty seconds of yourself.
For that brief duration, you were asked to simply be present—to look at your own face, to sit with the strange loop of watching yourself watching yourself. Somewhere in those twenty seconds, without warning, a photograph was taken. You didn't know when. You couldn't prepare. You could only be.
Then the moment ended. The camera stopped. And you were shown what was captured.
This piece asks a simple question: can a moment be recorded without being destroyed?
We live in a culture of constant documentation. Every experience becomes content. Every gathering becomes a photo opportunity. We say "pics or it didn't happen"—as if existence requires evidence, as if presence without proof is somehow less real.
But what gets lost in the recording? When you're performing for the camera, are you still experiencing the moment? When you're thinking about how this will look later, are you here now?
The Moment doesn't answer these questions. It performs them. You were observed—by yourself, by the camera, by the piece itself. The photograph exists as proof. But the twenty seconds you lived are gone. The image captured one instant. The other nineteen seconds and 999 milliseconds disappeared.
You can keep the photograph. You can share it if you want. But the moment it documents is already unreachable. And maybe that's exactly as it should be.
Not everything needs to be captured. Not everything can be. Some experiences only exist in the living of them—witnessed by no one, proven by nothing, held only in memory, which is itself unreliable.
This piece suggests that the most authentic moments might be the ones we stop trying to document.
I built this piece because I was tired of performing.
Every conversation recorded for a podcast. Every thought turned into a post. Every meal photographed before eating. Every experience evaluated for its shareability. I realized I had started living my life as if it were content—optimized for an audience I couldn't see, judged by metrics I didn't control.
The idea came from a simple observation: I am never more self-conscious than when I know I'm being recorded. My language becomes more careful. My gestures feel staged. I am no longer experiencing—I am performing an experience for later consumption.
But what if the camera didn't tell you when it was watching?
The Moment emerged from that question. I wanted to create a situation where observation was inevitable but its timing was uncertain. Where you couldn't prepare, couldn't pose, couldn't optimize. Where the only option was to simply be present and accept that documentation would happen on its own terms.
Twenty seconds is both too long and too short. Long enough to feel uncomfortable. Short enough that you can't escape. You sit with yourself in a way that's increasingly rare—no distraction, no task, no performance, just presence.
The photograph taken during those twenty seconds is real. It happened. But it's not the full story. It captures one frame out of hundreds. One microexpression out of dozens. One instant out of an experience that had texture, duration, feeling.
I've spent the last several years building systems that claim to establish permanence—blockchain protocols, onchain archives, immutable records. This piece moves in the opposite direction. It's about ephemerality. About what gets lost in the capture. About the gap between living something and proving you lived it.
When you download the photograph, you get evidence. But the moment itself? That's already gone. And no image, no matter how high-resolution, can retrieve it.
I'm not arguing against documentation. I'm not suggesting we abandon photography or recording. I'm simply asking: what is the cost of constant capture? What do we lose when we prioritize proof over presence?
This piece doesn't resolve that tension. It holds it. You experienced something. You have evidence of it. But the experience and the evidence are not the same thing. They never were.
The Moment is part of a larger body of work exploring what resists capture. In Living Arcade, I gave machines permanence—smart contracts that run forever, autonomous systems that can't be turned off. In HumanStock, I showed how humans are processed as products—priced, recalled, warranted, governed by terms they never negotiated.
This piece completes a different question: if machines can have immortality, and humans are treated as inventory, what happens to the experiences that can't be tokenized, measured, or owned? What remains when the frame rate ends and the recording stops?
The Moment is my answer: nothing remains. And that's not a tragedy. That's the condition of being alive.
You were here. You saw yourself. A photograph was taken. The moment is gone.
That's all any of us ever get.
— Aaron Vick
The camera was invented to stop time. To hold a moment that would otherwise dissolve into memory and then into forgetting. For most of its history, photography was an event—a decision to document, a setup, a pose, a click, a wait. You knew when you were being photographed. The camera announced itself.
Then cameras became ubiquitous. Phones, surveillance systems, doorbell sensors, satellites. We are now photographed hundreds of times a day without awareness or consent. The camera no longer announces itself. It simply observes.
The Moment sits in this tension. It tells you a photograph will be taken, but not when. It restores the inevitability of surveillance while removing the performance. You cannot prepare. You can only be.
Twenty seconds is long enough to become uncomfortable. Most people cannot sit still, doing nothing, looking at their own face, for that duration without distraction. The mind wanders. The body fidgets. Self-consciousness rises.
This is intentional. The piece is not about capturing you at your best. It's about capturing you in the midst of being—bored, distracted, uncertain, present, absent, thinking about something else, returning to awareness. The photograph taken during those twenty seconds will not be flattering in the conventional sense. It will be honest.
Honesty and flattery are rarely the same thing. We have trained ourselves to perform a specific face for cameras—the practiced smile, the tilted angle, the expression that says "I am present and happy and worth documenting." The Moment bypasses that training. By not telling you when the capture occurs, it removes the opportunity to perform.
What remains is something closer to who you actually are when you're alone: distracted, contemplative, blank, thinking about lunch, momentarily present, then gone again.
The piece uses visual language borrowed from observation systems: the ambient border that pulses during recording, the subtle text that appears ("be here"), the clinical reveal of the captured image. This is not accidental.
We live under constant surveillance. Cameras in stores, on streets, in our pockets. Algorithms tracking our clicks, our searches, our movement patterns. Corporations building detailed profiles of our behavior. Governments collecting metadata on our communications.
Most of this surveillance is invisible. We forget it's happening. We go about our lives as if we are not being watched, even though we are—constantly, comprehensively, without consent.
The Moment makes surveillance visible and consensual. You agree to be observed. You know it's happening. But you still don't know when the capture occurs. The piece gives you just enough control to feel implicated in your own observation, but not enough control to fully manage it.
This is the condition of modern life: we consent to systems we don't fully understand, under terms we can't fully control, and then we are surprised when those systems know us better than we know ourselves.
When the twenty seconds end, you are shown the photograph. This is the proof. This is the evidence that you were here, that this happened, that you existed in this specific configuration at this specific moment.
But what does the photograph actually prove?
It proves that light reflecting off your face was captured by a sensor at a particular instant. It does not prove what you were thinking. It does not prove what you were feeling. It does not prove the nineteen seconds and 999 milliseconds that weren't captured.
We treat photographs as if they are objective records. They are not. They are fragments—one frame out of an infinite series, one angle out of 360 degrees, one instant out of a continuous flow. The photograph makes a claim about reality, but the claim is always incomplete.
You can keep the photograph. You can share it. You can delete it. But the moment it claims to document is already irretrievable. Memory will overwrite it. Time will erode it. Eventually, even the photograph will be lost—a corrupted file, a dead link, a format no longer supported.
Nothing lasts. Not the moment. Not the image. Not even the systems we build to preserve them.
The Moment is one piece in a trilogy exploring what resists documentation:
All three pieces share a thesis: the things that matter most resist the systems designed to measure them. Not because those systems are poorly designed, but because some aspects of human experience are structurally incompatible with capture.
Presence cannot be fully documented. Thought cannot be fully owned. Identity cannot be fully fixed. These are not failures. These are features. The inability to capture everything is not a limitation—it is a condition that makes meaning possible.
If every moment were recorded, presence would collapse into performance. If every thought were owned, conversation would become litigation. If every self were fixed, growth would become impossible.
The Moment does not argue against photography or documentation. It simply asks: what do we lose when we prioritize proof over presence? When we live our lives as if they are content waiting to be captured, curated, shared?
There is a longer history here. Before cameras, before writing, before language, there was only lived experience—unrecorded, unwitnessed, held only in memory. Most of human history happened without documentation. Most lives were never written down. Most moments dissolved into time without leaving a trace.
We tend to see this as loss. An entire civilization wiped out because no one wrote their story. A person forgotten because no photographs survived. A moment erased because no one was there to record it.
But maybe erasure is not only loss. Maybe some things are meant to be temporary. Maybe the value of a moment is not in its preservation but in its passing.
The Moment sits at the edge of this question. It offers documentation—you get the photograph. But it also insists on ephemerality—the experience itself is gone. The piece does not resolve which matters more. It holds both as true.
You were here. The photograph proves it. But the being-here—the texture of those twenty seconds, the thoughts that moved through your mind, the subtle shifts in awareness—that is already lost. And maybe that's exactly as it should be.
In a culture obsessed with capture—selfies, lifelogging, quantified self, blockchain permanence, onchain archives—The Moment offers a different proposition:
Not everything needs to be saved. Not everything can be. Some experiences exist only in their living. And when they're gone, they're gone. No photograph, no recording, no blockchain entry can retrieve them.
This is not nihilism. This is realism. Time moves. Moments pass. We are here, and then we are not. And in between, we have a choice: live for the camera, or live for the living.
The Moment doesn't tell you which to choose. It simply shows you the gap between the two—and asks you to notice what gets lost in the space between presence and proof.
You were here. A photograph was taken. The moment is gone.
That's all we ever get. And maybe that's enough.