In 2011, I had an idea called All Cameras On. The idea was pretty simple. Everybody suddenly had a camera. Not a good camera, necessarily. This was 2011.

Your phone might shoot 720p video if you were fancy. Somebody else might have a point-and-shoot. Somebody might bring a DSLR. Somebody might be holding a Windows Phone.

It didn’t matter. Go to a concert. The artist picks a song. Everybody records it from wherever they happen to be standing. Send me the footage. I’ll cut all of those different perspectives together into one video.

That was All Cameras On.

And because apparently I believed every new idea required its own domain name, email address, website, Tumblr, YouTube channel and Vimeo account, I built all of that too.

Fortunately, this terrible habit is now extremely useful to me.

Before the first show, I made an Episode 00 explaining the concept.

Watching this now is strange because there isn’t much distance between the idea in my head and what I’m describing on camera.

You’ve got a camera. Bring it to a concert, record a song or two, and send them to me. I’ll splice them together and make one video out of all of the footage.

That’s basically the whole pitch.

Vimeo says I uploaded that video on March 30, 2011. In it, I mention that the first show is “this Saturday.” So apparently I was recruiting camera operators approximately three days before beginning an experimental crowd-sourced multicamera concert-video project.

This also feels consistent with the historical record. And people actually did it. They sent me files. Fifteen years later, some of those files are still sitting in the ruins of old email accounts.

This is one of them.

That’s the part I find especially wonderful now. This isn’t a finished video. It’s evidence of the mechanism actually working.

Someone went to a show, pointed whatever camera they had at Noah, went home, and sent the file to adam@allcamerason.com because some guy on the internet had asked them to. Then I took that footage, combined it with everybody else’s footage, and made the thing.

So far we’ve positively reconstructed eight numbered performance episodes:

• Goldfinch.
• Noah Gundersen.
• Sean Hunting Morse.
• Youth Rescue Mission.
• Joseph Giant.
• Hot Bodies in Motion.
• The Local Strangers.
• Kris Orlowski.

And that finally solved one small mystery: I had always remembered making nine. Episode 00 was the ninth.

The larger problem is that most of the finished videos disappeared. For reasons I absolutely cannot explain, I put some of them on Vimeo. Those survived.

Most lived on the All Cameras On YouTube account. That account was connected to a Google Apps account for allcamerason.com. In 2014, Google started emailing me.

Your account has been inactive.

Please sign in.

Your account will be closed.

Seriously.

We’re going to delete this.

Hello?

Wygle?

Google sent multiple warnings. I missed every single one of them. The account was closed.

Eventually the domain disappeared too.

Years later, when I started excavating all of this for Wygle Wide Web, I had only a couple of finished All Cameras On videos that I knew still existed.

So ChatGPT and I started reconstructing the old YouTube channel from whatever the internet had failed to throw away.

• Emails.
• YouTube comment notifications.
• Old Tumblr posts.
• Google Alerts.
• Vimeo messages.
• Twitter posts.
• Dead links.

Anything containing a title or a YouTube ID.

Eventually we reconstructed the URL for:

Noah Gundersen — “Fire”
All Cameras On Episode 2.0

Then I fed it to the Wayback Machine.

Hit.

The old YouTube page loaded.

That was exciting.

Then the player loaded.

That was more exciting.

Then the video played.

I had found one of the missing videos.

Not a screenshot. Not a thumbnail. Not a dead page saying a video used to live there. The Actual Video.

There was only one small problem.

Noah had been turned into twins.

Two horizontally squished copies of the same video were sitting next to each other. Apparently what survived is very likely an old YouTube stereoscopic 3D rendition of the video.

Remember when YouTube was experimenting with 3D video?

I did too.

But the important thing was that it was playing. Which meant the Wayback Machine didn’t just have the old YouTube page. Somewhere behind that ancient player, it had the video bytes.

So we opened Safari’s Web Inspector and watched the network traffic. Buried among the requests were calls to something called videoplayback. Those requests pointed through the Wayback Machine to old googlevideo.com media URLs.

ChatGPT walked me through pulling one of those URLs out of the network request and feeding it to curl.

A progress bar started moving. Then there was an MP4 on my computer. I opened it.

Two Noah Gundersens. Still squished. Still side by side.

Beautiful!

I’d found a missing child, I didn’t care what condition they were in.

The strange thing about this project is that recovery rarely looks like opening a folder labeled:

ALL OF YOUR MISSING THINGS, 2001–2014

It’s more like finding an email that contains a YouTube ID that points to a dead page that has a Wayback capture that loads an obsolete JW Player that requests an archived Google Video file that can still be downloaded if you know which network request to steal.

The internet forgets things. But it forgets them badly. Pieces get left everywhere.

And sometimes, if enough pieces survive, you can put your hand into fifteen years of wreckage and pull out the actual thing.

Not a memory of it. Not evidence that it existed.

The Thing.

Which is more or less why I’m doing all of this.