Audience members at Arthur Ganson’s Seminar on September 14, 02009 were among the first viewers of The Lava Project Documentary, which premiered in our new Long Shorts series – short videos that explore, explain, or exemplify long-term thinking and responsibility.

The Lava Project Documentary was created by White Elephant DesignLab, a group of designers who explore natural phenomena and experiment with various materials and their external influences. Earlier this year, the group created a piece at the Kilauea volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii that was inspired by our promotion of long-term thinking through use of the five-digit date. Using a “02009″ stamp made of hardwood and aluminum, they imprinted the congealing surface crust of Pāhoehoe lava in order to equip the emerging lithosphere with its date of origin.

“We developed the idea of using this symbol only when we had already arrived on the island,” says Tobias Kestel of the design team. “We thought it was just the right symbol to use in this context of volcanic activity. Processes of new land being formed by lava flows have been going on for billions of years on the planet, which provided the perfect ground for embossing your symbol of long-term thinking.”

“We are aware,” Kestel adds, “that some people might still argue that we actually did alter the environment there. At the same time, the symbolic value and the message and discussions our action will provoke can be and will be of relevance, even if only a few people will start to think differently after having seen the results and having learned about your project, as we will always promote our project together with the reference to The Long Now Foundation.”

For additional photos and information about The Lava Project Documentary, visit the White Elephant DesignLab website.

Now with their second installment: Team Digital Preservation and the Aeroplane Disaster. In this episode, Team Digital Preservation takes on the problem of obsolete software by migrating important digital files to the most current formats.

This goes hand-in-hand with Kevin Kelly’s concept of movage. We’ve got to keep our digital information moving; from storage medium to storage medium, from software platform to software platform, and from file format to file format.

 I would love to find a way to see this documentary film on the oldest living tree if anyone out there knows how it is being shown…

The Curse of The Methuselah Tree

“I am not part of history. No. History is part of me.” This is the story of the oldest living thing on earth and its unique view of human civilisation. With narration and specially-commissioned poetry by Roger McGough.

This original film combines beautifully shot footage of Methuselah, the 26-foot bristlecone pine, with reconstructions of the thousands of years it has witnessed. But what if such a witness could speak? For the first time this 4,643-year-old is given his own voice.

Hear the tree’s perspective on passing of ancient civilisations, the settlement of America by Europeans and the testing of atom bombs 100 miles away in the Nevada desert.

See Digi-Man and Blizzard duke it out over digital plans of a nuclear powerhouse!! It is good to see an effort to make digital preservation heroic, which as we saw with the Apollo tapes below, it certainly can be.

From the halls of Digital Preservation Europe

The beautifully crafted short above by Bruce Banit (via Kevin Kelly’s blog) depicts a fantastical yet believable world building interface, in a future that does not feel too far off from where Google Sketch Up is now.  As if to prove that point, Stewart Brand sent over the below reference:

 This virtual “Telematics City” was built by design firm Hook for a Lexus marketing campaign.  The fantastic video linked above is a time lapse of the “building” of that city.  I guess it’s like the man said…

“The future is here, its just not evenly distributed yet.”  – William Gibson

And yet another Update:  Wired is running a piece today on the physical city modeling that has taken place, and features one of the greatest treasures in the SF Bay Area, The Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model in Sausalito.

The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds is an experiment in scale: By condensing 4.6 billion years of history into a minute, the video is a self-contained timepiece. Like a specialized clock, it gives one a sense of perspective. Everything — from the formation of the Earth, to the Cambrian Explosion, to the evolution of mice and squirrels — is proportionate to everything else, displaying humankind as a blip, almost indiscernible in the layered course of history.

Each event in the Evolution of Life fades gradually over the course of the minute, leaving typographic traces that echo all the way to the present day. Just as our blood still bears the salt water of our most ancient evolutionary ancestors.

This has to be one of the best, if not most humorous, perspectives on the progress of technology in our lifetimes that I have seen. Louis CK on Conan Obrien.

túrána hott kurdís by hasta la otra méxico! from Till Credner on Vimeo.

An excellent compilation of timelapse photography sent in by Stewart Brand.  It is part of the many great works at The Sky in Motion.com.

It is 02019.

A multi petabyte-scale simulation of global processes, called the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS), has just determined that, without immediate action, humanity will survive only another 23 years before the deadly synergy of five catastrophic Superthreats does us in.

The Superthreats are:
1. Quarantine — declining health and pandemic disease, including the current Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ReDS) crisis
2. Ravenous — the imminent collapse of the global food system
3. Power Struggle — the increasingly desperate search for alternative energy solutions
4. Outlaw Planet — challenges to human security and civil rights in the midst of hypercomplex information systems
5. Generation Exile — skyrocketing numbers of refugees and migrants in the face of climate change, economic disruption, and war

Your role is to flex your foresight, creativity and collaborative skills to contribute to our collective survival.

The GEAS report is available in full here, and video briefings on each of the Superthreats can be found here. One to get you started:

The scenario described above is the premise of Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game, which kicks off in just under two weeks’ time, on 6 October 02008.

Over the six weeks of the game, long term thinkers everywhere will have the opportunity to imagine themselves in this version of 02019, bringing their real-world expertise and ideas to bear on the Superthreats. The purpose of the game is to harness our collective insights and ingenuity; to help invent the future by playing it first.

It’s being run by the Ten-Year Forecast Program at the nonprofit research organisation Institute for the Future, Palo Alto (disclosure: I’m one of the Game Masters).

Get involved, and good luck. The clock is ticking.