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'Vinepeek' site taps Twitter's Vine to put humanity on parade

A new Web site strings together one six-second Vine clip after another and serves up a mesmerizingly endless stream of human experiences.

Edward Moyer Senior Editor
Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
Credentials
  • Ed was a member of the CNET crew that won a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors for general excellence online. He's also edited pieces that've nabbed prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists and others.
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Edward Moyer
2 min read
A selection of stills from Vine clips.

A selection of stills from clips that sped past as I wrote this post. The human experience parades randomly by.

Screenshots by Edward Moyer/CNET

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey calls Vine an all-new art form. Maybe he's right (though the six-second video clips created with Twitter's new app owe a debt to animated GIFs, home movies, YouTube, TV ads, stop-motion animation, filmmaking in general, and other forms of visual storytelling).

Regardless, it's true Vine has suddenly thrust something new into the hands of a great mass of people, making it supereasy for them to say something quickly with moving images (and then share what they've said with, perhaps, millions). That's bound to lead to some exciting discoveries.

Now a brand-spankin'-new website (Vine itself is only a day old) gives you the chance to see what folks are doing with the service and what sort of art might already be emerging from it. And just as interesting, the site itself -- Vinepeek, it's called -- qualifies as a kind of art piece of its own. It simply shows you, one after the other (and one at a time), clip upon clip upon six-second clip. It pulls newly posted videos from Vine in real time, from wherever people might be posting. Sometimes the clips loop a few times; more often they don't.

You might, for example, see a comical clip of a young woman standing, sitting, then lying down in the middle of a street. You might see someone's kids playing with Legos. You might see a pair of hands using an X-Acto knife to trim what looks like a school art project. You might see another person demonstrating how to separate an egg yolk from the white using an empty plastic water bottle as a suction device. Then there's a rain storm in an unidentified Latin American country. Then someone "telling" you something by way of words on flash cards. Then several views of a flickering candle. Then an all-black frame, audio only: the sound of a gurgling baby.

It goes on and on, like the dream of a deity or the endless reports being filed by many billions of little filmmaking, on-the-wall flies. It's humanity on parade. And you can see the genres and subgenres, the cliches and soon-to-be typical approaches, forming before your very eyes (it's heartening to see just how quickly people leap on a new opportunity to be creative). It's not an official Twitter site, so who knows how long you'll have to check it out.

And once you start watching, it's rather hard to stop.

You can take a peek at vinepeek.com here.

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