YouTube art project turns random old videos into a candid, beautiful stream of clips

There's hardly anything online these days that isn't heavily produced. We're constantly searching for an audience, performing for the camera, or, at the very least, wary of the internet's gaze. Regular folks with a couple dozen followers still stress over whether something is worthy of gracing their Instagram grid.

Not that long ago, however, the online world was far less polished. A candid video in 2024 typically involves someone asking their friend to take a "candid" shot. But in, say, 2011, random slice-of-life content was all over the internet. A new art project cleverly scraped YouTube for those moments — lost to time and lack of views — and turned them into a constant stream of nostalgia.

It's the kind of authenticity that's all too rare online these days.

The project, created by Riley Walz, is called IMG_0001.

Wrote Walz on their site: "Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in 'Send to YouTube' button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives."

Walz made a bot that crawled some 5 million of those videos and created a landing page where they'd play in random order. It's remarkably cool and weirdly nostalgic and worth checking out.

Tweet may have been deleted

I fired it up for about 15-20 minutes and was flooded with nostalgia. It doesn't hurt that, for me, most of these random vignettes come from an era when I was in high school and college — those are inherently nostalgic times. I saw a video of the East Coast's 2010 Snowmageddon, a guy telling his friend what he thought of Silver Linings Playbook, and people dancing to Skrillex's "Bangarang." There will, of course, be plenty of videos in languages you don't understand.

Also, fire this thing up, and you will certainly see some grainy concert footage, especially of the wildly loud Dubstep-heavy EDM of that era. But I also saw some tender moments, too. Dogs running in a field, weddings, kids' concert rehearsals. There was one where a guy slowly walked through his set-up to watch a soccer game in a video addressed to his friend. Another showed a car speeding down the highway — not very interesting — except I noticed it was my birthday, 12 years ago.

The project from Walz is really neat and, by its nature, unpredictable. But he's hardly a stranger to these kinds of tech endeavors. Notably, he also created a tool called "Bop Spotter" that tracks the songs played in San Francisco's Mission District via a hidden phone constantly running Shazam.

In an interview with KQED, Walz said, "I'm just a normal guy who knows something about technology and likes seeing amusing things."