On August 5th, 2004 at 12:00 noon GMT, and again exactly 12 hours later, 60 filmmakers around the world set out to capture a single Moment on Earth.

A Moment On Earth is a fascinating film project has been years in the making. Working with a huge network of independent crews and directors all over the the world, the yet-unreleased A Moment On Earth follows the stories and journeys of each crew and the people they captured on film.

Co-Producer Jereme Axelrod came up with the idea at the bottom of a latrine he had just dug in Honduras as part of an international outreach project. Thinking of his friends and loved one scattered across the globe, he hit on the idea of capturing and exploring as many simultaneous moments as possible.

It seems like a fantastic project, and their indie street cred goes through the roof when you find out that the producers sold shave ice outside their high school to raise money for the film. The website includes a 2007 Webby Award-honored mosaic of film stills and photos from from the moment gathering. For each image on the mosaic there is a close up and a caption detailing what was going on in the photographer’s mind.

The release is slated for later this summer.

[via Metafilter]

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I was once again reminded of Dan Bricklin’s excellent piece on long term software and thought it was worth a mention here.  His basic point is that a governments software, should be as lasting and shared as its other civil infrastructure.  The article does a great job of showing the perils of entrusting all our public records to proprietary software and formats.

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Projected view of New York’s skyline after construction
of Ground Zero Memorial :: image from timesonline.co.uk

Here at The Long Now we’re always interested in large-scale, ambitious architecture projects, partly because, of course, designing and building the 10,000-year Clock of the Long Now offers a few large-scale challenges of its own.

An article in the London Times this week offers a profile of some of the grandest, most iconic buildings currently on drawing boards, in pipelines, and increasingly, on skylines, around the world:

The planet has become a building site.
…
This is a boom time for architecture. Dubai, Beijing, Shanghai and Moscow are staking their claim to a place on the architectural stage, with no absurdity too extreme. Revolving, iPod-shaped and half-mile high buildings are going up everywhere.

To mark the boom, The Times has picked the ten biggest, most significant building projects now under way.

The intersection of architectural ambition and long-term thinking is an interesting place we find ourselves visiting time and again. One of the founding stories of the Long Now comes from architecture. Writes Danny Hillis, who conceived the (architectural-scale) clock:

I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing.

One of the ten projects named in the Times article is the memorial at Ground Zero, New York City, an interesting selection from the perspective of the long-term trendwatcher. At the end of 02001, when the 9/11 memorial project was first envisioned, Mayor Giuliani delivered a farewell speech saying that the World Trade Center site would be remembered 1,000 years hence, a sentiment echoed by others in the wake of the tragedy. And it seems the World Trade Center was thought of in grand, millennial terms long before it became for many, in 02001, a 21st-century sacred site. In Paul Auster’s Sonic Memorial, a man recalls watching the towers being built in his childhood, and his father saying: “These buildings will last for 1,000 years. They’ll be here forever.”

Architecture is one of the ways we engage the long term, because there we confront the simple fact that most buildings outlast their designers, in some cases — and the ambitious ideal seems to be — by many lifetimes. But there’s an interesting tension between the resource-intensiveness of large scale architecture and the kind of long view that comes into consideration in relation to structural soundness.

Reports the Times:

Countries from the US to Kazakhstan are in a building frenzy. They are all eclipsed, however, by the greatest building site of all: China, whose appetite is so insatiable that it is gobbling up half the world’s concrete and still has room for a third of its steel for pudding.

Strange that particular buildings are thought about and engineered for long-term survival, even as the sustainability of the “insatiable” building process which brings them into being can be put to one side.

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Muir Glacier as seen on August 13, 1941 (left) and August 31, 2004 (right).

Photography has now been around long enough that re-photography of certain sites can show over a century of change. Recent photographs depicting glacier retreat, like the ones above, have become the canary in the mineshaft of climate change discussion. Just as interesting to me are ones that show almost no change at all.

Some of the better re-photo web sites I have come across:

• USGS Re-photo project
• New York Changing
• Urban Life Through Two Lenses
• State Of The Cryosphere

More recently, GPS enabled cameras, and publicly shared mapping tools like Google Earth have made the ability of re-locating photograph sites even easier.

We have seen time lapse movies made of photographs that take place over months and years, but it will be interesting to see some that take place over decades and centuries. You can see this to some extent now with David Rumsey’s historical maps on Google Earth and the time-slider.

Also interesting is that many libraries and archives are making historical photos available on the web, so the opportunties for all of us to do re-photography projects are growing daily.

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art:21, a recent PBS documentary series on contemporary art and artists, featured an episode on works dealing innovatively with time, which I saw on DVD over the weekend. Among those profiled was Paul Pfeiffer (born in Honolulu, 01966) a video artist who now lives and works in New York City.

His work entitled “Morning After the Deluge” (after a Turner painting) is a twenty-minute loop of a flawless Cape Cod sunrise and sunset, edited together such that the sun itself remains fixed centre-screen, while the horizon appears to move across it.

Image from carlier | gebauer

Pfeiffer makes some interesting remarks on the piece in a 02004 article entitled “The Sun is God“:

I shot Morning After The Deluge in real time. I was interested in the idea that the video loop represents a disturbing notion of time being something that you can actually freeze. When you look at the image you don’t see anything happening. The sun and the horizon don’t seem to move. You might think it’s a still unless you happen to look at it at a moment when a bird is flying by.

In the art:21 show (of which streaming video extracts are available online at PBS), he notes:

These days, it’s quite idealistic to think of the viewer as being anything but distracted, given the kind of image-saturated world that people function in.

In “Morning After the Deluge”, you have to be there at least for a few minutes, if not for the full twenty minutes, to see the full loop and to get the full sense of the sun rising and setting. In a way, it’s not very viewer-friendly. The shot is in real time, it almost looks like nothing’s happening, you really have to stand for a while to get the sense that the sun is slowly setting and rising. In the meantime, though, there’s a lot of other action that’s happening on a much smaller scale. You have birds flying very quickly through the screen. It’s almost at a pixel level, barely there at all — but projected big, this is something that you get to see. So this is maybe what you enter in on as a moving image, but as you sit with it for a while longer, then the bigger movements become accessible to you.

This makes for an interesting comparison to Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings, which was recently hosted by Long Now and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. In a Wired interview from last week, Eno says:

It strikes me as one of the most interesting things about these shows is not one of the most immediately visible. One of the strangest experiences you’ll be having is an experience of time in a different way. You’ll see people rushing in off the street and they’re all busy and their body language is hectic — a “show me what’s happening” kind of language. And you watch them gradually settling down and start to slow down to the pace of the work, which is very slow. People seem really, really grateful for this possibility.

Pfeiffer challenges his distracted, image-saturated viewer to tune in to the real-time pace of a day beginning and ending, and Eno draws in crowds and keeps them for hours at a time with a mesmeric unfolding of practically endless visual (and musical) possibilities. Two very different approaches, but both are experiences intended to elicit and reward patient, sustained attention. This is an interesting development; perhaps part of a broader aesthetic backlash also including the Slow Food movement? For in the visual arts, a field of endeavour where it seems increasingly difficult to capture interest with conventional shock tactics, that which demands a certain kind of careful attention — which decelerates — may be some of the most daring artwork of all.

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photo of flooded Thames by elyob

The Long Now’s Long Bets project asks us, active bettors and wider public alike, to think more deeply and carefully about the medium- to long-term future than our assumptions (and busy schedules) might otherwise allow.

Nudging our culture towards assuming greater responsibility for addressing (and creating) possible futures is an ambitious undertaking, but the “bet” concept at the core of the project does seem to capture something fundamental about our predicament as creatures gifted — and burdened — with foresight. In some respect, every decision is implicitly a bet, a step taken despite the uncertainty of what comes next. In a 02006 article, Michael Chabon poetically put it this way:

[I]n having children—in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now. They are betting on their children, and their children after them, and theirs beyond them, all the way down the line from now to 12,006.

Even having kids is a bet, from this angle. Still, there are less lyrical, though deeply significant, bets being placed all the time — and not just on Superbowl Sunday. One relatively new arena for betting explicitly on future possibilities in the world of finance is the catastrophe bond. In April, London’s Financial Times reported a world first:

Investors have been given their first opportunity to bet against the possibility of a disastrous flood crippling business in the City and Canary Wharf, with the sale of the world’s first “flood” bond on capital markets.

The new $150m bond has been issued by an arm of Allianz, the German insurer, to protect itself from devastating claims that might arise from companies affected by such a flood.
…
In recent years, insurance companies have turned increasingly to the capital markets to spread their vulnerabity [sic] to catastrophes, and have already issued bonds whose value is linked to US hurricanes or earthquakes.

However, it has until now been impossible to create flood bonds, because most countries lack precise systems to measure damage.
…
The inaugural issue is worth $150m, but Allianz has in place a programme to issue up to $1bn in the future.

(Gillian Tett and Andrea Felsted, Insurers launch ‘London flood’ bond, Financial Times, 10 April 2007 [online]; 11 April 2007 p. 1 [print edition])

The report describes an interesting trend, of insurers spreading the financial risk associated with natural disasters to the capital markets (in the event of hurricanes, earthquakes, and now floods). A space to watch, in light of increasing concern over extreme weather events caused by climate change. But aside from underlying reasons for the shift (greater volatility?), the key point here is the enabling mechanism — increasing availability of ways to measure increments of disaster. What can be measured can be bet on. Those who follow Long Bets will know that adjudicability of bets is one of the key questions for long bettors. Rhetorically grand, but forensically fuzzy, claims are Long Bets’ bête noire. They run into the bar of adjudicability (and hence accountability) deliberately raised by the project. What we see here is that risks which can be specified and measured with sufficient precision become subject to the gaming of financiers. And it seems that, if and as technologies for quantifying natural processes improve and become more widespread, the pool of events we can rigorously bet on, in the world of finance or otherwise, will continue to grow.

Perhaps not just large-scale natural events, but other things (internal bodily processes? social dynamics of organisations or countries?) could become quantifiable, hence “bettable” — a site of unprecedented accountability. What might this mean in the long run for how risk is managed in society?

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Philip Tetlock (screen shot from high-res Seminar video at members’ webpage)

Philip Tetlock recently presented a Seminar About Long-Term Thinking to the effect that confident forecasters ought to be ignored. Despite his research showing the profound unreliability of such speculation, it’s rare to find even a moderately systematic evaluation of political forecasts in the popular media. In this category comes an article from the online version of Radar magazine earlier this year, “The Iraq Gamble”, which scrutinises journalistic commentators’ predictions about the war in Iraq. In it, writer Jebediah Reed tracks the fortunes of predictions against those of the predictors, and is disturbed by what turns up.

[M]aybe something is amiss in the world of punditry. Are the incentives well-aligned? Surely those who warned us not to invade Iraq have been recognized and rewarded, and those who pushed for this disaster face tattered credibility and waning career prospects. Could it be any other way in America?
…
So we selected the four pundits who were in our judgment the most influentially and disturbingly misguided in their pro-war arguments and the four who were most prescient and forceful in their opposition.
…
Then we did a career check … and found that something is rotten in the fourth estate.

The suggestion is that American meritocracy seems to be in trouble when it comes to the careers of political pundits. Eight journalists’ profiles are presented under two headings: “Getting rich by being wrong”, and “Right but poor”. As one of those drafted into the latter category, Jonathan Schell, remarks: “There doesn’t seem to be a rush to find the people who were right about Iraq and install them in the mainstream media.” Meanwhile, certain confident voices have prevailed despite the question marks over their track record (a similar point is made in an article from FAIR.org last year, addressing the Iraq-related statements of columnist Thomas Friedman, who also comes into the firing line in the Radar piece).

Whether or not one agrees with the argument as applied to this politically contentious topic — and a larger sample would be required to draw firm conclusions — it seems clear that improving accountability (i.e., correspondence of reputation and record) for predictions made by public figures remains a major challenge in politics and the media alike. It’s an aspiration embedded in the Long Bets project, and any readers who think they can do as well as, or better than, these guys — on any topic of public interest — is encouraged to test their long-term prescience by placing a wager on the site.

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Making long-term thinking viable depends partly on rendering slow processes perceptible, compressing them onto a scale we can relate to more easily. Given that the quintessential long-now change processes (geology, deep culture etc) extend over many human lifetimes, a similar challenge is to make the passage of time more personal.

Here’s an addition to our Long Shorts gallery which does both of these things rather elegantly, using the simple but always interesting time-lapse approach. It’s a film by a New York-based photographer, Noah Kalina, who took a photo of himself every day for six years. The film, like the person, is a work in progress, as well as testimony to a formidable patience that evinces the kind of long-term thoughtfulness we’d like to see more often.

It also invites reflection on your own aging — for better or for worse…

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On Sunday, the Long Now Foundation hosted the closing show of the San Francisco installation of Brian Eno’s art peice, 77 Million Paintngs. About 400 Long Now charter members and their friends showed up.A very strange thing happened at the show, although Eno says it is a common reaction to other installations of this piece. The audience walks into the darkened room, where a huge screen glows with imperceptively changing visuals. The color is dazzling and very bright. Eno says this installation is the largest scale his 77 million paintings have ever been shown. When visitors walk in they immediately sit or lie down on the floor, and in total silence stay there for hours on end.They may not even move. Imagine an art viewing with no talking, no fidgeting, no jittering. Instead there are evolving paintings and evolving music which is moving glacially, slowing everyone down to its speed. It managed to take hi-rev San Francisco do-ers and movers and completely alter their internal clocks so they actually stopped and meditated. It really did feel like church.

Here are a few images I took, and in one case manipulated into an faux oil painting.

Eno as an oil painting.

The ghost of Stewart Brand checks the screen before the event opens.

Eno sihloutte against projection screen.

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photo by James Home

Here at Long Now we are just now coming out of our daze from producing Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center over this last weekend. We are updating this page with photos and write ups and you can see Flickr photos here. Friday and Saturday evenings were absolutely packed with nearly 800 and 1000 attendees respectfully.

We were a bit shocked to find that the big crowd for each evening came right at the opening time, leaving the late night crowd with the installation much to themselves. Many people stayed for hours with the installation, it was an incredible sight to see 400 bodies laid out in complete silence, bathed in the glow of 48,000 lumens of high definition imagery (I shot this pic from up above in the cat walk).

The Sunday evening members event was a nice change of pace with a few hundred less people who were as much into mingling as seeing the piece, giving the party area and the installation a nice balance of people. Brian Eno was also able to join us for this final evening and say a few words about this piece relates to Long Now.

A parallel event was also run in Second Life organized by Blueair.tv and built by Annabeth Robinson. Brian Eno was even able to log in briefly on Sunday evening.

Long Now would love to thank all of our new members for whom this event was arranged, Brian Eno for allowing us to put it on, Obscura Digital and AVPS for their advice, support, and incredible projection gear, the unstoppable Rock Star Bartenders, Yerba Buena Center For the Arts, all of our staff and volunteers, and our local 16 stage-hands for putting it all together.

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