Join Long Now’s Rosetta Project on November 6 from 4 – 7 pm at UCLA’s Hammer Museum where we team up with San Francisco-based CRITTER for an Enormous Microscopic Evening.  We’ll put a Rosetta Disk under the microscope, check out the fine (and finer) print, and maybe hunt for Easter eggs…  More information on the evening’s lineup from the Hammer Museum:

Enormous Microscopic Evening examines the museum from a microscopic perspective with CRITTER, a San Francisco-based salon dedicated to expanding the relationships between culture and the environment. The evening will focus on demonstrations and workshops about building and manipulating microscopes. Materials and samples taken from around the museum will be examined. Continuing the theme of microscopy, there will be micro performances (short concerts with tiny instruments) and other related events throughout the museum.

Long Conversation – Pete Worden Announces 100-Year Starship from

As part of our Long Conversation event on October 16th, NASA Ames Director Pete Worden discussed a new DARPA/NASA research endeavor he called the “100 Year Starship” (see above).  This small mention originally reported by Amara Angelica at the Kurzweil AI blog has sparked a bit of a media dust up with over 70 stories including Nature, Wired, MSNBC and even Fox news trying to turn it into a cover up (bizarre considering he announced it).  A few days ago DARPA released an official press release on this project (text of which is below and here is the actual PDF).  The release outlines how nascent and speculative this “project” really is.

At Long Now we are obviously happy to see the press taking interest in such a long-term story.  It seems to have captured quite a bit of imagination — and speculation.  However as you can tell from the press release it is not as though we are going to be hopping on our interstellar space ship tomorrow.  Not only will the ride take at least a century, the road to having the technology is likely a century or two out itself.  Pete Worden, NASA and DARPA should be praised for taking the first steps to think on this scale.  This type of thinking is both rare and brave.

“Throughout history technical challenges have inspired generations to achieve scientific breakthroughs of lasting impact. Several decades ago, for instance, the race to the moon sparked a global excitement surrounding space exploration that persists to this day. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the NASA Ames Research Center have teamed together to take the first step in the next era of space exploration — a journey between the stars.

“The 100-Year Starship study will examine the business model needed to develop and mature a technology portfolio enabling long-distance manned spaceflight a century from now. This goal will require sustained investments of intellectual and financial capital from a variety of sources. The yearlong study aims to develop a construct that will incentivize and facilitate private co-investment to ensure continuity of the lengthy technological time horizon needed.

“‘The 100-Year Starship study is about more than building a spacecraft or any one specific technology,’ said Paul Eremenko, DARPA coordinator for the study. ‘We endeavor to excite several generations to commit to the research and development of breakthrough technologies and cross-cutting innovations across a myriad of disciplines such as physics, mathematics, biology, economics, and psychological, social, political and cultural sciences, as well as the full range of engineering disciplines to advance the goal of long-distance space travel, but also to benefit mankind.’

“DARPA also anticipates that the advancements achieved by such technologies will have substantial relevance to Department of Defense (DoD) mission areas including propulsion, energy storage, biology/life support, computing, structures, navigation, and others. Beyond the DoD and NASA, these investments will reinvigorate private entrepreneurs, the engineering and scientific community, and the world’s youth in a bold quest for the stars.

“The 100-Year Starship study looks to develop the business case for an enduring organization designed to incentivize breakthrough technologies enabling future spaceflight.”

[October 28th 02010, DARPA news release. Media with inquiries, contact DARPA Public Affairs, DARPAPublicAffairsOffice@darpa.mil]

(Update:  Another good analysis and update from the Centauri Dreams blog)

Photo by Jessie Levandov

Opening: Global Lives Project Installation
at The Long Now Museum & Store

Wednesday November 10
6:00 – 8:00 pm

We’ll be celebrating the opening of a Global Lives Project installation at the Long Now Foundation Museum & Store on the evening of November 10th. Please join us for drinks, snacks and some words from Global Lives Project Founder and Executive Director, David Evan Harris. Global Lives Project filmmakers Ya-Hsuan Huang and Jason J. Price will also be in attendance to answer questions.

The Global Lives Project is a collaboratively-built library of human experience gathered from an orphanage in Kazakstan, a corner store in China, a street car in San Francisco and many other locations foreign and familiar. It takes shape online and as a video installation.

Framed by the arc of the day and conveyed through the intimacy of video, we have slowly and faithfully captured 24 continuous hours in the lives of 10 people from around the world. They are screened here in their own right, but also in relation to one another.

There is no narrative other than that which is found in the composition of everyday life, no overt interpretations other than that which you may bring to it.

By extending the long take to a certain extreme and infusing it with the spirit of cinema verité, we invite audiences to confer close attention onto other worlds, and simultaneously reflect upon their own.  The force and depth of human difference and similarity are revealed in this process. Gaps which mark cultural divides feel, at once, both wider and narrower.  This sense – that we, as humans, are both knowable and unknowable, fundamentally different as well as the same – opens a space for dialogue.

-Artist’s Statement 2010

Long Conversation – Pete Worden Announces 100-Year Starship from The Long Now Foundation.

On October 16th, Long Now hosted the Long Conversation as part of our Longplayer event.  Speaking with Peter Schwartz about the future of space travel, NASA Ames Research Center Director Pete Worden announced a collaborative project between Ames and DARPA.  The two agencies have set aside just over a million dollars to begin research on a 100-year starship.

The announcement was first publicized by Amara Angelica writing for the Kurzweil AI blog:

NASA Ames Director Simon “Pete” Worden revealed Saturday that NASA Ames has “just started a project with DARPA called the Hundred Year Starship,” with $1 million funding from DARPA and $100K from NASA.

“You heard it here,” said Worden at “Long Conversation,” a Long Now Foundation event in San Francisco. “We also hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund,” Dr. Worden added. (No further details on this are available from NASA at this time.)

“The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,” he explained. “Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.”

It later bounced its way over to Huffington Post and MSNBC’s Cosmic Log.

UPDATE:  On Oct 28th DARPA released this official statement (PDF).  MSNBC also covered it here.

Long Now has been invited by experimental artist Misha Glouberman to be a partner in a commissioned performance he’s created for Ann Hamilton’s Sound Tower – an 80-foot tall site-specific sculpture located on the Oliver Ranch in Geyserville.   This participatory event takes place on Saturday September 25, 02010 in Geyserville California.

Terrible Noises For Beautiful People is a performance where all the sounds are made by the audience, using their voices, in a series of structured improvisations and games led by Misha Glouberman. Glouberman predicts “some amount of yelling, a certain amount of running around, and also some really quiet parts,” and hopes to create an audible environment that will be exciting, alarming, and sometimes beautiful.

The Sound Tower has a resonance for Long Now as both Ann Hamilton and the Clock Team used the Well of St. Patrick in Orvieto, Italy as a source of inspiration.   Ann Hamilton, for this site specific, 8 story high Sound Tower and Long Now, for the underground chamber that the Chime Generator and other Clock components will be placed in for the 10,000 Year Clock.  This is a chance to feel what it may be like to visit part of the Clock.

Limited tickets for the Saturday performance are available for Long Now Members and their guests, there are 2 additional nights of this performance which are open to the public through a partnership with the Arts Council of Sonoma. Please email events (at) longnow (dot) org for more information.

The Long Now Foundation presents

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

The opening of SFMOMA Artist’s Gallery’s new show, Wondrous Strange: A 21st Century Cabinet of Curiosities is the impetus for an evening to explore ideas about time though art, whimsy, music and mechanics.

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