Long Now was invited to be part of the art exhibit “Self Storage” which transforms a storage unit in San Francisco into a library of Ephemera open to the public under the care of a librarian and indexed for consultation and handling.

Curatorial Industries opening reception for “Self-Storage“Friday, April 18, 2008 from 7-10PM The Hardware Store Gallery, 3824 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94110The project titled Self-Storage was inspired by the historical precedent of the Dymaxion Chronofile, a system that Buckminster Fuller devised to chronicle his life.This unusual collection of boxes, their contents contributed by a roster of international and local artists and archivists, will be available for consultation beginning April 18 and ending May 18, 2008. “Self-Storage” is located in a publicly accessible facility at 300 Treat Avenue in San Francisco and its regular hours of operation will be Wednesday to Sunday from 12 to 4PM and by appointment.The newly assembled collection includes a handsome central service point for checking out boxes for in-situ use and for obtaining library memberships. A dedicated computer station and a card catalogue indexing all print, non-print, 3D, audiovisual, and other unclassified objects, will be made available for public use.

A lively array of public programming during the months of April and May will be announced on the official website.

I just got this great note in from our friend Davide Bocelli in Italy…

Dear Alexander,

I was thinking about “Long Now” and “housing” and I found a page on wikipedia on the very ancient town of Matera with her multimillenial heart. In Italian we call this place “Sassi di Matera” (the Stones of Matera). For the last 9000 years people lived in this area. Objects nfrom the Paleolitic age was found in the caves that form the core of the town. And thousands of these caves have been converted into houses and used and re-used for centuries and centuries. The place has known periods of abandon and repopulation following the ups and downs of demography and local economy, but there is still people that, quoting the English Fodor’s Guide, “can boast to be still living in the same houses of their ancestors of 9,000 years ago”. The local authorities with UNESCO and foreign partners are working to revive the area. There are many things to learn from this site: it is so interesting to see, in this poor and simple multimillenial neighborhood, how they managed water or they oriented of the main door of the house to take advantage of the sunlight.

Some links:
Sassi di Matera (in English)
http://www.sassidimatera.it/
Wikipedia (in English)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassi_di_Matera
Pictures of the Sassi (in Italian)
http://gbmaragno.interfree.it/

(Image above: A view on Matera – bottom, the rocks; center, the ancient houses that are partly made of cave or dug into the rocks; on the horizon, some  contemporary constructions, far away. )

- Craig Venter’s Long Now Seminar will be airing tomorrow, Thursday April 17th at 8pm in the usual KQED lecture slot (eg. Commonwealth and City Arts and Lectures) in the Bay Area

- Long Now was also featured in the nationally syndicated NPR Soundprint piece by Barbara Boegaev and Queena Kim in “Escape From Time” (click link to listen on line), also it may be re-airing on Sat the 19th on KQED.

- Stewart gave a short talk at the Bay Area Yuri’s Night celebration and Long Now was there with a table about the Rosetta Disk launched in space, and the Solar Synchronizer. (Thanks to Danielle, Austin, Laura, Kurt, James W and Mikl for working the long hours) – Scott Beale of Laughing Squid recorded a bit of Stewart’s talk

- Long Now will also be showing at the Maker Faire on the weekend of May 3-4

There’s a very good article in this month’s IEEE Spectrum about the engineering challenges of replacement parts for devices intended to survive much longer than industrial cycles of obsolescence. The economics of making sure parts are available in a timely and cost effective fashion and task of designing management processes that survive long enough are discussed in depth. From the article:

Obsolescence also isn’t limited to hardware. Obsolete software can be just as problematic, and frequently the two go hand in hand. For example, an obsolescence analysis of a GPS radio for a U.S. Army helicopter found that a hardware change that required revising even a single line of code would result in a $2.5 million expense before the helicopter could be deemed safe for flight.

My favorite example device is the B52 bomber. First produced in 1946, it’s not expected to be phased out till 2017. I guess this is equivalent to 10,000 “internet years”.

 

 

Image credit: Christopher Sharp

Could the paucity of long-term thinking in the United States be due to a want of engineers in high places?

So suggests a report in EE Times, a long-running electronics industry newspaper, published earlier in the month. It argues that that engineers bring a valuable future-orientation and tendency to think long-term to the political process in a number of other countries, but that this pattern is not reproduced in the U.S.

Here’s an extract:

Engineers elsewhere apply their talents to the political sphere, but those in the United States, unfortunately, don’t–and there are no signs the situation will change anytime soon. The overwhelming majority of American engineers choose industry and business, not government or policy, as their rightful place, even as their counterparts around the globe see no conflict between politics and their profession.
[...]
Engineers in China are acknowledged as key players in the country’s rapid economic rise. They’re overrepresented in the Chinese Politburo and among government ministers, said William Wulf, president emeritus of the National Academy of Engineering and a professor at the University of Virginia.

Their role on the political stage is a reason for the country’s success. “That’s a real part of why China is doing so well,” Wulf said. Lawyers predominate in American government, and while their solutions often address the immediate problems, they don’t give much thought to future implications, he said.

The engineering mindset tends to focus on the long term. When you build a bridge that will be there for 100 years, you have to think about its impact, and its ability to absorb future traffic growth and adapt to new kinds of transport. “A lot of what we’re seeing in China’s astounding growth is that sort of long-term thinking,” Wulf said.
[...]
“In Islamic or developing countries, people usually study engineering simply because they think it offers them a better future,” [says professor of chemical engineering and materials science at the University of Southern California, Muhammad] Sahimi, who is also the National Iranian Oil Co. chair in petroleum engineering at USC.

Their analytical ability leads many engineers and engineering students to political activism in those settings, he said. In Iran, for example, the majority of those in government leadership positions have engineering backgrounds, said Sahimi, who is Iranian-American.

~Sheila Riley, “Engineering ‘mindset’ doesn’t include politics“, EE Times, 2 April 02008

A designer named Acanthusleaf posted in the LiveJournal Clockworker’s Guild community commentary and pics of this latest project, a gorgeous armillary ring, not unlike a very, very tiny rendition of The Clock’s Orrery:

This past week and a half, I have been obsessed with making this ring. It is a variation on one pictured in Historic Rings by Diana Scarisbrick. I would want to be her when I grow up, but I want to make the stuff as well as study and write books about it. The original opens out at a 90 degree angle to the outer ring, but I can never leave well enough alone, and I figured a shallower angle would evoke more of that armillary sphere effect that she claims was the point of the original.

This entry, I believe, signifies the official coining of the term “Clockpunk”. I think it will catch on as a meme; after all, steam is hot, but gears are gripping.

Thusly, it has also been proven that LiveJournal is not just for emo kids and bad poetry.

Yuri’s Night Bay AreaSaturday, April 12th, 020082pm – 2amat Nasa Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
www.ynba.org
Yuri’s Night is a celebration of space exploration, and the first human in space Yuri Gagarin. With a theme this year of Radical Technology for a Sustainable Future and events happening in 49 countries, we’re excited that Long Now is one of the presenters!Stewart Brand will be giving a short talk on the first image of earth from space. We’ll be bringing the Solar Synchronizer and showcasing some new visuals for the Rosetta Disk. An early prototype of the Rosetta Disk is on the European Space Agency’s Rosetta Mission – you can see where the Mission is in our Solar System here.

It should be a great event with art installations, science booths, lectures and great lineup of music – stop by our booth #51 if you’ll be attending – tickets are still available through the Yuri’s Night website.

Royal Pingdom has a nice pictorial history of computer memory up on their blog.  While it is in no way complete, I love pictures like the one above showing women in their 2001 Space Odyssey outfits running server rooms.

The world of high end watches can get very strange. Where the least function with the highest complication, fetch the highest praise and highest price. This particular piece is no exception, but caught my eye however as I like the vague and slow representation of time. A watch using one of the most intricate mechanical movements yet devised for time keeping, the tourbillion, that basically only tells you if it is day or night. At $300k the target audience must be very well to do Vampires and Orcs.

Computer artist Scott Blake recently launched an online project entitled “Every Barcode“, which we hereby add to our expanding gallery of long term art…

Blake’s “Every Barcode” (exhibited for the next few centuries at http://www.barcodeart.com/every_barcode.html) is an animated conceptual Net art piece representing every imaginable consumer product. Begun on February 27, 2008, it will take approximately 317 years to complete, thanks to an inherent 100 billion mathematical and visual possibilities.

The work counts through each UPC number from 00,000,000,000 to 99,999,999,999 at 10 digits per second. When the number matches an item registered in the official UPC Database it flashes the name of the manufacturer and product description for one tenth of a second.

Says Blake of his chosen theme:

My bar code art explores the process of making art with information and technology. As a computer artist I am in the business of selling 0′s and 1′s. The bar code represents automation, efficiency, and commodities. It is the universal icon for the computer revolution.

Those mystified as to how UPC (“Universal Product Code”) bar codes work may find enlightenment here.

Bar codes appeared in the mid-20th century to facilitate commercial sales and inventory, but the standardised UPC system was not invented by George Laurel until 01973, 35 years ago. Therefore the 317 years it would take Blake’s artwork to systematically and mathematically traverse the full possibility space encompassed by that design is nine times as long as it has been in existence.

Notwithstanding the project’s centuries-long future horizon, “Every Barcode” is decidedly a historical effort: a sort of temporal exploded view of the possibility space encompassed by the UPC design. And as such, it affords an interesting way of looking at where we’ve come from in terms of tagging and tracking a commercial subset of our physical world, dutifully ticking away at Blake’s website.

The piece may or may not last until 02325 — wanna longbet? — but regardless of how far into the future it endures, the practices of consumption and computation are rapidly changing today, and with them, so might we expect the technological iconography to shift, well before then.

The status of UPC as a “universal” tracking system, and hence its survival as an “icon for the computer revolution”, is currently in question as cheap, ubiquitous RFID tags (a.k.a. smart labels), touted as imminent replacements for the bar code, help usher in the age of Spimes. Futurist Bruce Sterling:

[P]retty soon, you will be wrangling Spimes.

The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story.

Spimes have identities, they are protagonists of a documented process.
[...]
We need to document the life cycles of objects. We need to know where to take them when they are defunct.

In practice, this is going to mean tagging and historicizing everything. Once we tag many things, we will find that there is no good place to stop tagging.

The age of Spimes is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet: consider the maps of tracked objects, people, and vehicles — which are curiously individualised and schematic at the same time — for example here and here (“Flight Patterns”).

(Thanks to Sean Smith for passing on this link.)