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.

Each year, Japanese farmers in the town of Inakadate in Aomori prefecture, some 350 miles north of Tokyo, create “crop art” in the local rice paddies…

From Pink Tentacle:

This stop-motion video of the 2008 Inakadate rice crop art is composed of still images captured daily from June 1 to July 3, 2008 via the roof webcam at the adjacent town hall. The 3.7-acre work features the images of Daikoku, god of wealth (left), and Ebisu, god of fishers and merchants (right), which were created using five different colors of rice plants. On July 4, just as the crop was beginning to mature, the organizers shut down the webcam when they removed the JAL ad portion of the artwork at the request of the rice paddy owner.

So what’s the story?

Inakadate Village started to create rice-paddy art in 1993 as a local revitalization project. No one will take credit for the idea, which seems to have just grown out of meetings of the village committee.
[...]
Divided into teams, they used four kinds of rice: two ancient varieties called ki ine (yellow rice) and murasaki ine (purple rice) that grow into yellow- and brown-leafed plants respectively, and also more modern Beni Miyako (Red Miyako) and Tsugaru Roman, an Aomori variety with a fresh-green color.

~Yoko Hani, “Homegrown Art“, The Japan Times, 26 August 02007

Some photographs of earlier efforts can be found here.

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!)

I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. If I hurry I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time.

~Danny Hillis, “The Millennium Clock“, 01995

As we at the Long Now are well aware, one thing about designing clocks is that, like any mechanical system, they can go wrong.

This 01953 sketch from Sid Caesar’s live-to-air weekly comedy program Your Show of Shows reminds us just how true that is.

The Baverhoff clock may be broken — but surprisingly, after more than half a century, the comedy still works.

(Link via Nerve.com)

This wonderful video posted online last week by New York-based performance art collective Improv Everywhere showcases their latest project, “Frozen Grand Central”, which mischievously targeted victims of the Big Apple’s notoriously short now.

At first I wondered whether this had anything to do with the campaign by Adbusters Media Foundation, a Vancouver-based activist network, to promote a Slow Down Week in the middle of last month (13-19 January 02008).

Apparently not.

Now, I love the idea of staging performance art simply to cause “scenes of chaos and joy in public places”, as Improv Everywhere’s website has it, but Adbusters really could have used this kind of intervention to boost to its cause. (At the time of writing, googling the phrase “Slow down week” yields 7,050 hits; “Frozen grand central” gets 22,900.) Personally, I clean forgot about Slow Down week for the duration. It was the start of semester and one of my busiest weeks in the past year. Oops.

(Nice find, Zander.)

Stills from Feed (blog) at Stash (DVD Magazine) online.

Herewith, an elegant “long short” featuring the formation of an island from scratch, from the stirring of an underwater volcano to lush tropical paradise in less than sixty seconds. Okay, so it’s a beer ad — we’ll rip off long shorts wherever we find ‘em.

Click the image above to go to the video.

A lifelog, or lifeblog, is an attempt to fully document every second, every action, every interaction, every keystroke, every conversation of one’s life. In this sense it is quantitative as it accumulates data about a person’s daily activities. But among lifeloggers there is a subgroup of photo lifeloggers who are merely content to photographicly record their life in detail. There are many photologgers who take a portrait of themselves everyday. 
 
One of the longest running of these daily guys, JK, now has a daily 8-year series of himself. He recently turned that series into a wonderful and mesmerizing timelapse animation.
 
This fellow JK also maintains a list of other maniacal photologgers here. Daily portraits seem to be a big thing in Germany. Some like to keep the photo constant from day to day in an almost clinical uniformity. Others are committed to dressing themselves up to maximize diversity from day to day.  But the obsessive nature needed to maintain anything daily for years shows up in a few really obsessive photologgers. One guy takes a picture of whatever is in his right hand for the first time that day. Here is an excerpt from part of his day on December 6, 2007.
 
It’s an odd collection only because its trouble to take it. Someday when cameras will film our lives 24/7, this degree of documentation won’t be freakish.

The job of the long view is to penetrate illusion. […] How can we see the insidious transformations of our own day? Slow science is part of it, applied history is part of it, and every year there are more sophisticated tools of macroscopic vision. One video going the rounds of the conferences shows the accelerating growth of human population on a world map; the sudden overwhelm in the last seconds makes audiences gasp in shock.

~Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now, 02000, p. 146

Despite some pretty clunky animation, by present standards, this 01990 version of the World Population video packs the visceral punch, the acceleration shock of a compressed long view.

A few notes:
(a) This version is from a TV broadcast and is bookended by talking heads; you can skip to the main event which runs 0:45 through 3:35.
(b) It’s produced by Population Connection, an advocacy organisation formerly called Zero Population Growth. In aid of driving home the point, it (perhaps unnecessarily) includes projected figures in the same breath as historical ones, which muddies things somewhat. A bit more about the video can be found on p. 18 of this pdf report.
(c) A more recent version, updated 02000 — but longer and no more compelling — can be found here. The main segment there runs from 1:40 through 6:00.

But what do we get out of this type of video visualisation? Gleick’s remarks on the ubiquitous curve of exponential increase may point us in the right direction…

You have seen [this] graph. You have seen it more than once. It depicts the long-threatened population explosion, or some kind of population explosion, plotted over a few centuries, or millennia, or any time scale at all. It represents the growth in computer ownership over the last two decades. The number of commercial Internet hosts rising over a mere four years. Software patents granted from 1971 to the present. Chest-pain emergency departments in the 1990s. Millions of instructions per second carried out by a matchbook-sized computer. Potential sexual partners. Mustards. Published words. Four-minute milers. Everything, it seems, that grows out of the interaction between human beings. The amount of stuff we do, divided by the amount of time available. [...] If a graph can be a cliché, the graph for exponential growth has become a cliché.

~James Gleick, Faster, 02000, pp. 275-6

So, the main offer of a video such as this, is seems to me, lies not in its details so much as its broad approach to making the familiar strange — our unprecedented 6.5 billion population, for instance. In short, it makes the cliché of accelerating change shocking again.

Thus do we recover the long view.

This short film is a groovy meditation on time in a few of its facets:

“Dislocation in time, time signatures, time as a philosophical concept, and slavery to time are some of the themes touched upon in this nine-minute, experimental film, which was written, directed, and produced by Jim Henson-and starred Jim Henson! Screened for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in May of 1965, Time Piece enjoyed an eighteen-month run at one Manhattan movie theater and was nominated for an Academy Award for outstanding short subject

It’s also bloody funny. Trust Jim Henson to make high art that doesn’t take itself too seriously.



Thanks Laughing Squid!

Paolo Savagione (lead engineer on our Clock Project) sent in this nifty video of a 1000 year forestry-clock idea in France. We have talked about ideas like this for the 10,000 Year Clock, but this is the first simulation of such an idea I have seen. I think however that there might be more successful ways to use this idea that would be as interesting in the moment as they would be in time lapse.