Besides the canonical Bristlecone Pine, there are many other organism on earth that will outlive you. Photographer Rachel Sussman has been traveling around the world to find and photograph them. I’m surprised by the number and variety of long-lived organisms. I very much like that she includes the low lifes — lichen and so forth. You can keep up with her investigations with her intelligent blog.

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For all the Long Now and Brian Eno fans down in the LA area -  The University Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach is presenting an installation of Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings through December.

The LA Times has a good description of the installation and brief interview with Mr. Eno:

It consists of a wall of 12 computer-operated monitors of varying dimensions, displaying a procession of constantly mutating images that group and regroup into a virtually limitless series of configurations. The protean “paintings” are accompanied by Eno’s ambient original score.

Eno also designed the installation’s computer software and hand-drew the interchangeable images on slides, using etching tools and paintbrushes. Most of the configurations are abstract, but Eno occasionally added variety by tossing in found art culled from magazines and elsewhere.

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“The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples’ attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation,” Eno says. “I point to this work as a counter-problem. I think it’s a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.”

The University Art Museum’s telephone number is 562.985.5761 and they are open Tuesdays through Sundays from noon to 5pm, except Thursdays, on which they stay open until 8pm.

Long Now presented the North American premiere of the piece in 02007 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

The latest Seminars About Long-term Thinking are now available as audio downloads or podcasts and in hi-res video for Long Now members.

Arthur Ganson on “Machines and the Breath of Time” – video now available

The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

Roy McDonald writes: “For the long news I’d suggest almost anything on mental health. My thesis is that we are in the stone age in understanding mental illness, minor and major and that it’s something we’re capable of making great progress on in the next century. If we improve mental health globally seems like we could reduce a lot of violence, social tension and international conflict as well as improve economic productivity.”

Here are some recent stories on the topic:

1. First, the bad news: Common mental disorders may be more common than we think

2. The scale of the problem:
More Americans taking drugs for mental illness
U.S. spends $9 billion on child mental illness
100 million in China suffer from mental illness

3. You can’t get away from your problems, no matter how far you go: Feeling low up high: the lonely astronaut

4. An interesting blog post: Are artificial intelligence and robots the future of mental health?

5. Some hope: UCLA researchers develop biomarker for rapid relief of major depression

6. And a prescription: Groups are key to good health

We invite you to submit Long News story suggestions here.

Now with their second installment: Team Digital Preservation and the Aeroplane Disaster. In this episode, Team Digital Preservation takes on the problem of obsolete software by migrating important digital files to the most current formats.

This goes hand-in-hand with Kevin Kelly’s concept of movage. We’ve got to keep our digital information moving; from storage medium to storage medium, from software platform to software platform, and from file format to file format.

Long Now London Meetup member Adam Becker sent in a write-up describing Jem Finer’s Longplayer Live event in the UK:

Jem Finer’s 1000 year composition Longplayer moved from virtual instruments to real ones on Saturday, September 12th at the Roundhouse in London. He amassed a collection of musicians to perform an excerpt from the piece over the course of the day, filling the main performance space of the venue with the pulsing, metallic voices of Tibetan singing bowls for 1000 minutes.

Dressed in blue-gray army surplus style uniforms, the musicians gave the place the look of a Bond villain’s lair, some kind of mysterious, devious activity going on. Even so, the result was child-friendly, plenty of young ‘uns running around, or falling asleep in their parents’ arms, Zenned-out by the chiming bowls.

Downstairs something less abstract was happening – a series of conversations (each 36 minutes long) between a host of scientists, journalists, historians, mathematicians and more.  These had their own ebb and flow, some pairings warming up right before they were gonged out, others getting straight into it, clearly having researched their partner/opponent and wanting to have some fun.

The talks provided a great accompaniment to the music above, the participants clearly aware that this event was somewhat to do with long-term thinking, but not hammering the point.  Upstairs again, and the music played into the night, sonically and visually elegant, and one of the most unusual things to be found in London on a Saturday night.

(Some beautiful photos here: http://longplayer.posterous.com/)

The latest Seminars About Long-term Thinking are now available as audio downloads or podcasts and in hi-res video for Long Now members.

Arthur Ganson on “Machines and the Breath of Time” – audio now available

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking

presents Stewart Brand on “Rethinking Green”

Friday October 9, 02009 at 7:30 pm at the Cowell Theater

Long Now Members can reserve a seat HERE

You can purchase tickets for $10 HERE

About this Seminar:

This talk launches Brand’s new book: Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.  His argument is that taking account of the emerging global forces of climate change, urbanization, and biotechnology forces a rethink of some traditional environmental positions.

Cities are Green, with huge room for improvement.  Nuclear power is Green, with better still to come.  Genetic engineering is Green and shows potentially revolutionary promise.  Direct intervention in the climate—geoengineering—may be necessary.  The classic environmental project of restoring natural systems has to step up in scale and deepen the quality of its science and engineering.

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Dancing Chairs

“You follow the feeling of the piece,” Ganson explained, “and then wrestle it into physicality.” As long as the idea is nonphysical, it is permanent; it becomes temporary as a physical device; and then it becomes permanent again in the mind of the viewer.

As Ganson spoke, a tiny chair walked meditatively around and around on a rock on the right side of the stage, projected live onto a video screen. (Thinking Chair.) No part in any of his kinetic art pieces is superfluous…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary

The latest Seminars About Long-term Thinking are now available as audio downloads or podcasts and in hi-res video for Long Now members.

Wayne Clough on “Smithsonian Forever” – video now available