Running Backwards in Tokyo

A 28-year-old named Ludovic Zuili ran backwards through Tokyo for nine hours and filmed the whole thing. Then it aired on French television, but they played the footage in reverse so it looked like the city was moving backwards around him and everyone else was just going about their day normally.

I got a kick out of it. There’s something great about a project that exists purely because someone thought of it and actually did it—no statement, no deeper point, no lesson to extract. Just nine straight hours of backwards running through one of the world’s busiest cities, documented for the sake of it. The fact that it made it onto French TV says something about the margins of media, or maybe just about how bored we’ve all gotten looking for something that hasn’t been done a thousand times already.