Longplayer San Francisco

1,000 years in three simultaneous acts

TICKETS

Saturday October 16, 02010

Longplayer 7:00am to 11:40pm at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Long Conversation 3:00pm to 9:00pm at the Contemporary Jewish Museum

Long Now Members can reserve 1 seat, join today! • General Tickets $28

About this Event:

Jem Finer’s Longplayer is a 1,000 year long composition that’s been playing in one form or another since the beginning of the millennium. For 1,000 minutes this October 16th, it takes the form of 18 musicians playing hundreds of singing bowls on a 60 foot-wide custom-built instrument in YBCA’s Forum.

Longplayer will be presented with the Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area’s most interesting minds.

Interpreting the Long Conversation in real time will be a data visualization performance by Sosolimited; an art and technology studio out of M.I.T.

Tickets are good for all events; the 6 hour Long Conversation, performance by Sosolimited and the 16.6 hour Longplayer performance. Read more about Longplayer San Francisco HERE.

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Now and When: Installation detail for Proof by Margaret Tedesco & Matt Borruso

The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery is hosting a series of conversations about time in conjunction with their current show Now and When. On Wednesday August 18th, Alexander Rose will join Jeannene Przyblyski of the San Francisco Bureau of Urban Secrets in a discussion of “linear and not so linear” approaches to time.

There are 30 seats available for this talk and they must be reserved by calling or emailing the SFAC Gallery (415.554.6080 or sfac.gallery@sfgov.org) no later than 24 hours prior to the event date.

The event will run from 6:30pm to 8:00pm and will be held in the SFAC Main Gallery at 401 Van Ness at McAllister inside the Veteran’s Building.

From the event website:

Curated and moderated by Gallery Assistant Shannon Green, these conversations will introduce the artists’ work in the exhibition and the guests’ demarcation of time in their own professions. As the events unfurl, the discussion will be opened up for audience participation. The aim of this programming is to make the art of Now and When and ideas of time more accessible and meaningful.

During his Seminar, Jesse Schell recommended a number of books and other resources that have informed his conception of the Gamepocalypse.  Here’s a list of the books for the curious:

• Authenticity, by James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II
• Finite and Infinite Games, by James P. Carse
• The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil
• The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen
• The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley
• Good to Great, by Jim Collins
• Punished by Rewards, by Alfie Kohn

He also mentioned a movie called Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, a website called Couch to 5K, and plenty of other fascinating things.  Oh, he’s on twitter too: @jesseschell

Artwork (from left to right) by Jo Ann Biagini, Sharon Beals and Michele Muennig

From 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on July 22, 02010 join Long Now and the SFMOMA Artist’s Gallery as we open both venues and close off the adjoining street to delve deep into the Wunderkammer installation in the Gallery, the 10,000 Year Clock prototypes at Long Now and the Golden Mean, aka the Snail Car. There will be prizes for the best costumes so gather your time traveler gear – think late 18th through the early 20th century – and head our way! Musical accompaniment will be provided by punk band “The Grannies” and entertainment by the Burley Sisters burlesqueteers.

Its title derived from a line in Midsummer Night’s Dream, the show looks at the wondrous and the strange as propellants for the imagination of the viewer. Featuring works by more than a dozen Bay Area artists and including photography, sculpture, and painting, the exhibition explores themes such as evolutionary biology and history, progress and decadence, and the carnal and the intellectual. This contemporary version of the Cabinet of Curiosities provides a rich environment for the work of these 21st century artists who strive to reconnect us to the sources of wonder.

Long Now’s Executive Director Alexander Rose will be presenting a live webinar on StimulusTV.com.  The broadcast is hosted by Steven Latham and will last about 30 minutes.  Registration is free and open to the public.

What will happen in the next 10,000 years?
Tuesday, June 29th, 02010
4:00 – 4:30 pm PST
StimulusTV.com

Long Now has been invited to participate in the Exploratorium’s After Dark event on Thursday June 3 from 6pm to 10pm.

• The Exploratorium has generously offered complimentary tickets to Long Now members, please see your email for details.
• Tickets for the General Public are $15, a year’s After Dark pass $25, and admission is free if you are a member of the Exploratorium.

This monthly get-together is focused on the over 21 set and features special exhibitions, film screenings and lectures built around a new theme each month. Exploratorium builders, scientists, artists and special guests provide an evening’s worth of entertainment from unusual exhibits, hands on art and science experiments, musical and artistic performances and more all while you are encouraged to enjoy some cocktails and socialize!

We’ll be bringing the working circular pendulum, escapement and Clock dial; Long Now staff will be on hand to demonstrate and explain our prototype.

The theme for the After Dark event on June 3rd is Time:

From seasonal cycles and perceptions of “the present” to calculations of satellite orbits, time is so much a part of our lives that we often take it for granted. Tonight we examine time’s many faces through activities and presentations featuring honeybees, jump-shot photography, a performance by Gamelan Sari Raras, and a tour of Einstein’s breakthrough ideas on space-time by Dr. Thomas Humphrey.

Explore antique timepieces with clockmaker Dorian Claire and The Long Now Foundation’s 10,000 Year Clock project; physicist Ron Hipschman will be on hand to reveal the science of carbon dating and the astronomy behind our calendar year. Horologic artworks, exhibits, and films await, inviting new encounters with this age-old fascination.

Long Now is pleased to be exhibiting a new working six foot diameter pendulum and Live Rosetta Scanning Station at O’Reilly Media’s Maker Faire Bay Area Saturday and Sunday, May 22 and 23 at the San Mateo County Event Center.

Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tear the back off technology and make it their own. Each year several hundred creators, geeks, artists and scientists come together to share their creations with tens of thousands of enthusiastic visitors. Last year about 80,000 people visited over the 2 day event.

Long Now will be bringing a visual prototype of the 10,000 Year Clock dials assembled with a working escapement and six foot diameter pendulum. This Pendulum ticks about once every 10 seconds, and the escapement is a novel design. The Live Rosetta Scanning Station will show real time book and document scanning with a chance for Maker Faire participants to give it a try themselves.

Tickets can be purchased online. There is limited parking and often significant traffic in the area, so we recommend you take public transit. If you are planning on coming to Maker Faire this year, please stop by the Long Now booth – #165 in the Expo Hall – and say hello!

Global Lives Opening - Big Screen Installation in the YBCA Forum

A second ongoing installation in the YBCA Room for Big Ideas provides a more intimate viewing space, with ten partitioned rooms and LCD viewing screens.  Each room is furnished with seating for one or two, and with walls and floors embellished with fabrics, colors and textures evocative of the region of the film.  Kiosks and wall graphics give a bit of background about the project, and the ten participants.  And while the installation as a whole gives the sense of a finished, polished project, three computers set up prominently in the room tell a different – and quite wonderful – story.

Global Lives Project - Installation in YBCA Room for Big Ideas

This is not a finished project – in fact, it is very much a work in progress.  One of the greatest ongoing efforts is one that anyone can help with – the subtitling of each film in as many languages as possible (through the crowdsource subtitling site dotSUB).  The first pass was getting all ten films subtitled in English for the opening night, and that effort is still only about 80% done.  It is an enormous effort.  Jason Price, one of the producers of the Malawi shoot, tells the story of being nearly at wits end trying to find anyone to help translate Edith Kaphuka’s Chichewa into English — until someone suggested he set up a Facebook Group, and then 2,500 mostly expatriate Chichewa speakers arrived ready to help (there are, of course, many speakers of Chichewa in Malawi, but the need to access streaming video to do the translations made that nearly impossible).

Through the steadfast effort of about 25 of these people, the full twenty four hours of video has now not only been transcribed and translated, but put thorough about five stages of checking, rechecking and review to ensure its accuracy.  And, it is now the largest corpus of spoken transcribed Chichewa on the web.  (What might this ‘seed’ corpus enable down the road?  Chichewa online dictionaries?  Spell checkers?  Natural language processing?  Search? This group of translators may, without realizing it, be forging the way for a real Chichewa language online presence.)

For Global Lives, this set of ten videos is just the beginning of a much larger library of human life experience.  Not grand experiences, not Hollywood, not Bollywood — in the words of David Harris, the project’s director (responding to the umpteenth activist proposal, this one by yours truly) “we want boring!”  Because what we see as the everyday, the mundane, the routine is in fact a picture of our own humanity – and for that each Global Lives shoot is worth a thousand Hollywood productions.

The Global Lives installation in the Room for Big Ideas will be open through June 20, 02010 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  The Long Now Foundation sponsored the world premiere installation in the YBCA Forum through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

• Long Now and Global Lives Project celebrates the opening of its first installation on Friday February 26th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.  The event is free, but you’ll want to RSVP so you can be sure to get in.  The installation will be up on Saturday and Sunday over the weekend as well.
  
• Beth Noveck on “Transparent Government”  Thursday March 4, 02010 at 7:30 pm at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats free, or you can purchase tickets for $10 each.

• Alan Weisman on “World Without Us, World With Us.” Wednesday February 24 (Thanks for coming this event went great)

Dedicated to bringing together video documentation of the daily lives of disparate global citizens, the Global Lives Project celebrates the opening of its first installation on February 26th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.  This opening is sponsored in part by the Long Now Foundation through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The Global Lives Project’s World Premiere installation will be on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from February 26 – June 20, 2010! The exhibit is part of an artist residency that will evolve over four months. We will be showing, for the first time ever, our series of ten 24-hour videos of daily life from around the planet.

Join Global Lives, Long Now and the YBCA for the opening night celebration on February 26th from 7:30pm to 11:30pm.  There will be a cash bar and music from San Franciscans Kid Kameleon, Chief Boima, and Tinker.  Global Lives producers and directors will be there to discuss the project.

The event is free, but you’ll want to RSVP so you can be sure to get in!

As you may remember, Longplayer is a project by Jem Finer: a composition designed to last 1,000 years.  Along with a live performance of portions of the composition last year, a Long Conversation was held that lasted for 12 hours:

In parallel with a live performance in the Roundhouse’s Main Space, the Artangel Longplayer 2009 Conversation took place in the Studio Theatre. Writer Jeanette Winterson began and ended the 12-hour talking marathon of twenty leading writers, filmmakers, scientists, academics and technology activists, inspired by the philosophical implications of long time.

MP3 audio of that conversation is now available.

Those of you in the general vicinity of Berlin should check out the next round of the Long Conversation at the Transmediale Futurity Now! Festival on February 5th.  The following evening (Feb. 6th) will feature presentations by Bruce Sterling and our very own Alexander Rose on the topic of Atemporality.

Officially inaugurated in 02002, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is an attempt by Egypt and the city of Alexandria to recreate, in spirit if not content, the original Library of Alexandria.  The Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt created what was at the time, the worlds largest library in the third century BC in the Egyptian city of Alexandria.  Though historical accounts disagree as to how, why and when, this massive repository of centuries of scholastic work was burned down and lost to the ages.

Long Now Board Member Michael Keller sent in notice of his event coming up at Stanford University on December 2nd in which Dr. Ismail Serageldin will be discussing his work as the Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and his hopes for better dialogue between the West and the Muslim world:

Stanford University Libraries is pleased to present two lectures by Dr. Ismail Serageldin.

At 2:00 pm: The New Library of Alexandria: A Beacon of Knowledge

At 4:30 pm: For a Better Dialog Between the West and Muslims

Refreshments will be provided after the second lecture.

The lectures are being held in the Dinkelspiel Auditorium.  Call 650-736-9538 or email sonialee@stanford.edu for details/reservations.

Of Note: The Bibliotheca Alexandrina has a complete copy and physical backup of the Internet Archive.

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is holding its 10th anniversary Quantum to Cosmos Festival this month in Waterloo, Ontario.  The 10 day extravaganza has the theme this year of “Ideas for the Future” and seeks to “take a global audience from the strange world of subatomic particles to the outer frontiers of the universe.”

They’ve got lots of great lectures that are free to view online, including several by speakers in our seminar series:

• Stewart Brand will be on The Agenda with Steve Paikin Friday night to discuss science’s evolving role in society and on Saturday he’ll be giving his own lecture on his Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Whole Earth Discipline.
• Peter Diamandis spoke on Sunday about the X Prize Foundation.
• Neal Stephenson spoke with Lee Smolin and Jaron Lanier about using fiction as a window into science and he’ll be joining Tuesday night’s panel on The Agenda with Steve Paikin to discuss our increasingly wired lives.

There are many other scientists and thinkers on the schedule, and each of these lectures will become available online shortly after the live event, so keep checking back on the full list to see what’s new.  (A play button will appear on the icon for each event once the video is released.)

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.

…

“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.

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/)