Here’s an amazing video by Italian street artist Blu: Muto, “An ambiguous animation painted on public walls”, painstakingly produced in Baden (02007) and Buenos Aires (02008), and full of astonishing transformations and lovely interplays between 2D drawn space and 3D, physical elements…

Animation plays with how we experience time by constructing an illusory continuity. However, most of the time it aspires to immerse the viewer fully in the world it posits, by allowing no trace of the artist’s process or environment to sully the frame.

A fascinating twist comes when it’s executed in the street — which I don’t recall seeing until today. Even as every image is effaced by its successor, all leave a trace. But what’s especially cool about this, from a long now perspective, is how the foregrounded timescale of these drawings-in-motion (accented by “real time” sound effects) is overlaid on accelerated shifts in traffic, light and shade of the urban backdrop. This helps make the film at once both strangely ordinary and quite surreal: beautiful.

(Link. Thanks Jake!)

There’s a new play debuting at the Washington Ensemble Theater in Seattle inspired by Long Now and the Clock project, written by Long Now member Paul Mullin.

“It takes place in three or four different worlds that are deeply divided by time but intimately connected by ideas. It starts out 6,000 years ago in the wilderness, then we’re at a cocktail party right now, with a playwright and Hollywood producer, then we’re in the future.” Paul Mullin

The play has received some excellent press, from the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Stewart Brand sent me this link to one of the nicest web clocks I have yet seen. Make sure you do click through as the image above does not do the animated form justice. It is called Analogy by Jessson Yip.

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

*Niall Ferguson and Peter Schwartz debating “Historian vs. Futurist on Human Progress” – video now available

Making money WITH the poor

When Iqbal Quadir applied to US colleges from his home town in Bangladesh he was surprised to discover that not all American universities were found in Washington, DC. That’s how it was in Bangladesh, where everything of importance was centralized in the capital city, Dacca. He later realized that Bangladesh was not unique; in most developing countries, the infrastructure is concentrated in one or two cities, leaving the rural areas almost blank. As he acquired degrees and experience in finance, he realized that this centralization is not only a mark of poorer countries, it is probably a cause of their poverty…

Read the rest of Kevin Kelly’s Summary

Wired is running a good piece on what exactly the RAW file format is, and why you should always use it on your digital camera. It is a good reminder that most compression formats cheat us out of precious (but now cheap and plentiful) data bits, either through “lossy” algorithms or their very proprietary nature.

update:  It was pointed out that in fact many RAW formats themselves are proprietary.  This is a good point and care should be taken to be sure you store your images in an open format like PNG for the long haul.

The folks at Radio Lab have produced a good piece on time in general. It covers a lot of materia, some of it more campy than informative, but had some new info for me at least.

 

• Spice Clock: A clock that tells you what time it is in the dark based on smells released during the night.
• Clock of Birds: A highlands people of Papua New Guinea use the songs of certain birds to determine the time of day.
• Clock of Flowers: Linnaeus carefully crafted a flower garden that had certain flowers that would unfurl at certain times of day to tell the time.
• Leif Inge produced an art installation of Beethoven’s 9th that was stretched to 24hours which sounds wonderful.

The piece ends with a discussion of how time is relative based on experience, and how the very best moments we remember in life have a feeling of a swolen now.

(Thanks to Kent Corbell, charter member 172, for sending this in)

The always wonderful Paleo Future blog has uploaded a full PDF copy of a treatise on the future done in 01963 for a now lost time capsule. It is full of optimistic predictions of what the next century will bring from an era of happy futurism.

It is wonderful to see other modern craftsmen and artists working on machines like this again.  Eugene Sargent recently completed this beautiful Orrery commission for a client.  There is a very nice write up on the client’s web site as well as this fun video of it being produced.

Wired is running a cool pictorial on the new amorphous metal making techniques. These “metallic glass” materials have some amazing properties for making long lasting structures. Back in 01997 or so we tested some of these metals as pendulum flexures (as seen above).  In fact there is still test pendulum hanging on one of these here at our museum. At the time however the techniques for making metallic glass limited the material to only very thin strips, and were still prone to spiral type fracturing which kept us from using it in torsional pendulums. It looks like this new technique has a kind of hybrid molecular structure, that works similarly to a composite, and stops that type of fracturing. Very cool. Cant wait to get my hands on some…