One of our favorite muses, Jonathan Harris, just launched a new piece of visual storytelling and infoplay called The Whale Hunt. Here are a couple of snippets from his artist’s statement (hyperlinks his):

In May 2007, I spent nine days living with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States…

I documented the entire experience with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport, and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. The photographs were taken at five-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeat”. In moments of high adrenaline, this photographic heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 37 pictures in five minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of my own heartbeat.

The results are beautiful, and like his other projects, he doesn’t expect you to passively watch. The Whale Hunt lets you experience the photographs as a straight slide show, but he’s also organized the whole experience across a few different dimensions.

You can constrain your experience of the story by any combination of cast member, concept (blood, buildings, prayer, sleep…), context or cadence (measured in photos per five-minute interval).

The photos themselves are rich and gorgeous, and the glimpse into this thousand-year-old Inupiat tradition is simply wonderful.