Since 2015 François Bon publishes regularly his vlog or video diary, which he considers to be a form of literary expression. Just like Georges Perec’s Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien, these videos focus on the “infraordinary”, on the “rest” of the real, which we hardly ever perceive. This paper compares and contrasts Bon’s attempt at recording this aspect of reality with Perec’s work, retracing the evolution of the gestures that have served as means of recording from writing through photography to the spherical video and live streaming. The reflections of Vilém Flusser, theorist of the image and of technology, who had a strong influence on François Bon, will serve as a guiding thread for the analysis, which will allow us to inscribe the two authors’ work in a literary history of the attention to reality. The latter will matter in two senses : first, reality as an object of study and of writing which literature seeks and helps to capture, and second, as a social, technological, and cultural environment in which this capturing takes place and with which the author seeks to remain in synch by appropriating the most up-to-date tools.
