Look at the Birds of the Air

The whole thing is an algorithmic anomaly, really. Since its inception in 2005, YouTube’s become host to billions of videos – hundreds of millions of hours of footage – some of which will never be watched at all. That I came across his channel was a stroke of luck, I think.

“death of a transporter,” uploaded October 18, 2022. The link lingered in my recommendations feed for a few days before I finally opened it. When I did, I actually felt it: the rush of dopamine when the internet presents you with a pearl, when the endless doom-scrolling becomes somehow worthwhile, something rewarding.

I spent two days completely transported by a playlist of videos. Inhabiting another identity, immersed in a world entirely different to my own. A life stripped to its barest bones, and yet so rich. Watching, pausing, rewinding. Trying to absorb it all: the subtleties of simplicity, the potency of stillness, what’s said and left unsaid. I wanted to know more – but how do you learn about something unnamed?

There’s an absence of any identifiable information about the person running the profile to which these videos were uploaded. Instead of attaching his name to his account, as is typical of most content creators, the author remains completely anonymous, operating instead under the name of his channel: “nor gather into barns.” Barns, for short. All of his videos are obscurely titled and their shownotes vague or otherwise completely blank.

Most of us have spent a good chunk of our lives online in some capacity: surfing the internet, streaming movies, sending emails, storing documents on the cloud. Curating social media feeds, crafting online personas, commenting, liking, upvoting, posting. We leave a trail of digital footprints in our wake for anyone to find through a swift Google search. To leave no trace requires a combination of intention and attention. Tread lightly, proceed carefully. Make yourself scarce – or don’t. But still do, somehow.

Barns cites his profile’s titular video, “nor gather into barns,” as one of his favorites. He likens his channel to a book of short stories named after a standout piece in the collection. The video, he says, encapsulates both the spirit of his channel and the story of the past decade of his life. He’s just driven a diagonal line across America from Idaho all the way to Florida, and he’s drifting through the Keys in the dark, the night still stubbornly thick with heat, the cash from his most recent transporting job folded in his pocket.

“Should do something interesting with this money,” he vows to the camera. He approaches a pigeon perched on a mesh grate. Its face is thrashed open and oozing. Speeding cars hum and hiss nearby. The night-vision lens captures Barns in shades of green. His forehead is slick with sweat. Dawn arrives in a wide-frame time-lapsed shot. He balances on a cylindrical pipe attached to a highway bridge suspended over a waterway. Cut to the bus stop, lit cigarette in hand. B-roll of passersby, strip malls. His voiceover narration details his spontaneous plan to catch a cheap flight to Spain. At this point, Barns has about a thousand dollars to his name, which drains more so than dwindles as he embarks on his travels. 

The lifestyle Barns depicts in his videos is unconventional. He wakes up in cold cars or on park benches or curled on hard ground using his shoes as a makeshift pillow. He often spends an entire day not knowing where he’ll sleep that same night. On the road, time is measured in the twenty-four hours that stretch between successive meals, usually single rotisserie chickens eaten whole straight from the plastic. Barns lives from job to job, surviving on very little at once to scrounge up enough cash for the next leg of his journey.

Success is traditionally measured in direct proportion to the extent that one’s resources surpass what’s needed to satisfy their basic needs. And yet, Barns proves, one actually needs relatively little to survive – to thrive, even. He lives untethered from all but his faith in God, to the grander scheme, the force beyond his control that provides him with everything he needs. “Look at the birds of the air,” Jesus urges his disciples. “They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” 

Angels approach Barns in different disguises: a Moroccan Airbnb host with a plate of tea and cookies; a girl breathing out cigarette smoke in a dimly lit Berlin bar; a Spanish street busker; an older woman dancing in the street. “Do you believe in God?” she asks in her heavily accented English. The background music builds and their voices layer until their conversation becomes indecipherable. Not words but noise – music. The stranger song. 

Barns films her from behind: cropped dark haircut, leather jacket, hiking boots slung over one shoulder. She climbs barefoot over boulders. Then, in her dimly lit kitchenette. Thin fingers peeling and slicing wet vegetables. The frame pans tight on their two forks sharing a plate. The shot lingers long as Barns slides the last forkful of food through traces of oil – at least, I assume it’s him, savoring what must be his first homemade meal in ages. They embrace on her couch. Outside, clouds cling to mountain peaks.

The mid-2000s saw the advent of the vlog, or the video blog, when anyone with access to a camera and a wifi connection could become an amateur documentarian. The vlog is a time capsule; a portal. It was initially conceived as a form of truth-telling, an attempt to document reality. The genre was rough and raw – unpolished, unfiltered – which contributed to its appeal, offering viewers the rare opportunity to live vicariously through another person as opposed to Hollywood’s construction of a character.

The formal qualities of the medium lend themselves to an implicit truth. Handheld camera shots captured from the vlogger’s point-of-view, for example, mimic the human gaze. We’re seeing what Barns sees, perceiving the world through his eyes. We’re peering through the windscreen at the long ribbon of road unfurling ahead. We’re peeking at the dog sleeping in the backseat, watching the dense thicket of forest blur behind the passenger-side window.

But then the scenes subtly sharpen, almost imperceptibly refined through the high gloss of production. There’s an aerial shot of his car passing over a desolate highway. Conversations unfold from multiple camera angles. He sits across from a romantic interest, the pieces of a puzzle scattered on the table between them, parsing through the complexities of their relationship. The visuals and even the content are sometimes so cinematic as to suspend belief. There’s a line pulled taut between realism and artistry, and it’s seething with tension.

When his car disappears over a hill or he pushes his bicycle up the mountain road twisting towards Granada, I can’t help myself from imagining what goes into setting up each shot. I picture him carefully composing the frame, performing for the camera, backtracking to collect his equipment, retracing his steps. Exhausting, I assume, but necessary in service of his art. The content on his YouTube channel is part of “a larger and more intentional project than it might look like at first glance,” Barns confides, “and for that reason I’m sort of putting myself up as a sacrifice to serve the project, to serve the story.”

Long before Barns sits down to edit his footage, and even before he starts filming, he’s considering the larger narrative. Memories become clips arranged on a timeline, cut and spliced into cohesive storylines and compelling arcs. His description of his creative process calls to mind Susan Sontag, who, in her quintessential essay collection, On Photography (1977), explains that while the camera can authenticate experience by immortalizing otherwise fleeting moments, it simultaneously impedes upon reality “by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.” How much of what we’re seeing, then, has been enacted in the interest of plot progression or dramatic flair? To what extent do these vlogs convey truth, if at all?

The truth is that fact and fiction often overlap. To try to parse between the real and the unreal would not only be impossible, but detrimental. The entire thing would collapse. While the videos are impressive feats of filmmaking and storytelling, their real merit lies in all the gaps that are left to fill, the unanswered questions they provoke.

Barns is a self-proclaimed introvert, so inclined to protect his privacy that shooting footage feels burdensome. He prefers to travel light. Slumped on a mattress in a rented room in Spain, he fantasizes about ditching his “camera and tripod and batteries and all the fucking cords” to shed not just physical weight but also the responsibility of what it means to impose a camera on everyday experience. “It actually takes a lot out of me to film, especially in public,” he tells me.

His admission catches me off guard. The version of Barns I’ve come to know through his vlogs is comfortable talking to the camera and talking to strangers, talking to the camera in front of strangers and strangers in front of the camera. It’s a convincing performance – but is the performance still a performance if the performance is real?

“I wish I had the courage to film more often,” Barns continues. He explains that even while pursuing this filmmaking project, the most cinematic moments in his life (which he illustrates as “picturesque, romantic – moments where if I stopped to look around and take it in, I would easily feel sentimental about it all”) have occurred off-camera. What we’re seeing are only shards; sharp fragments; pieces of a whole. We’re inhabiting the liminal space between what is and what could be.

The self isn’t an entirely fixed entity. It’s malleable; it bends to our will. Soft putty shaped, squashed, sculpted. A surface imprinted with the specific texture of each new experience, every interaction, the moments passing. But the self also has its own muscle memory, its tendency to bend back into its original form. Barns’s work, then, is a balancing act. Fight or flight. To hide or to be seen. It’s the push and pull between who he is and who he needs to become for the sake of his art. It’s how far he can venture outside of himself without forgetting where he came from.

Barns surmises that if he were better at filming – more shameless, more forceful, more imposing – he wouldn’t be the same person. He wouldn’t produce the same art, because it’s precisely this kind of friction that produces sparks. This battle between the self and the persona exists at the heart of his creative process.

Barns describes cinema as man’s effort to mimic God. Characters are born from dust, a script written. Under the director’s craftsmanship, the various narrative elements – the performers, the dialogue, the backdrop, and chronology – combine into “a hopefully beautiful, possibly complicated story about someone’s life.” The art of filmmaking, like the art of self-creation, demands a delicate balance of control and surrender.

The complexity of Barns’s work doesn’t go unnoticed. It roils beneath the surface, stirring something so deep inside viewers that they’re not quite sure how to react at all. One user takes to the comments section to ask, “Can someone please tell me why these videos feel the way they feel?”

Here’s my unsolicited answer: they’re both the thrill of freedom and the loneliness that underlies a life spent drifting. They’re hollow hunger pangs and figs foraged somewhere on the side of the road. They’re the instinctual and the contrived, vulnerability and anonymity, foreign and familiar. They’re knowing and not knowing, levity and gravity, life and art. They’re straightforward, yet reveal so little. They’re the truth, or at least some version of it.