We found this wonderful visualization of future events from the world of film on infographipedia, courtesy of Tremulant Design. Most of the occurrences on the timeline take place during this millennium, though a few producers have ventured multi-millennial forecasts.

An exhibit currently on display at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center resurrects a liveliness rarely associated with Ancient Greco-Roman sculpture. When asked to conjure an image of Roman décor circa the year zero, sparkling white marble generally abounds. It turns out that a closer look at these millennia-old figures reveals that they were once covered in vibrantly-colored paints. In an article about the exhibit, Stanford News describes how undergraduate student Ivy Nguyen used ultra-violet light to find trace amounts of pigment on the surface of ancient sculptures, still present after over two thousand years:

While the technique is not new, Nguyen went beyond that with the use of x-ray fluorescence (XRF), commonly used in conservation sciences. XRF can find traces of pigment that are invisible to the unaided eye.

Nguyen’s ultraviolet imaging with the black light reveals “ghost images,” showing the areas that might be promising to test. The XRF reveals what’s in those ghost images.

Although other exhibitions have focused on painted Greek and Roman statues, this exhibition focuses on the science as well as the art, taking the visitor through the laboratory process with cases displaying pigments used in ancient times, wall-mounted images of the analysis and small, painted terra cotta works from Cantor’s ancient collection that were used as controls in the study.

Two versions of a restored sculpture are on display at the exhibit. One version includes colors that were found through testing while the other, taking into consideration that only base layers of paint have survived, includes additional layers of painted decorations that may more closely resemble the originals.

Through some combination of the quality of ancient pigment and the creative application of modern scientific technology we find ourselves able to catch a more accurate glimpse of a civilization long fallen. To see the painted replicas of Stanford’s Maenad sculpture (and to get some ideas about what materials to use for your next paint job), visit the Cantor Arts Center, which is free to the public. The exhibit ends on August 7th.

When it comes to Danish meta-mockumentaries about virtual worlds and mysterious clocks, My Avatar and Me is the one to see. Starring and co-directed by Mikkel Stolt, the film features cameos by Long Now co-founder Danny Hillis and the Foundation’s Nevada site.

My Avatar and Me can be viewed on Constellation.com, a global digital movie theater:

“My Avatar and Me is a creative documentary-fiction film about a man who enters the virtual world of Second Life to pursue his personal dreams and ambitions. His journey into cyberspace becomes a magic learning experience, which gradually opens the gates to a much larger reality.”

The next showtime is Sunday July 10th and writer/co-director Bente Milton will be virtually present to answer questions and to discuss the film.

The Clock of the Long Now measures time in 10,000-year increments. “The Clock,” a wondrous piece of video art by Christian Marclay, measures every single moment in 24 hours.

Composed of film clips drawn from the entire history of cinema, the piece literally tells the time, through images of clocks and watches as well as scenes of people looking at, talking about, or noticing the time. If you see “The Clock” at 9:18 in the morning, every film clip shows 9:18.

While it may sound dull — who would want to spend an hour, or twenty-four, staring at a clock? — the piece, in the watching, becomes a moving meditation on the history of cinema, and of our relationship with time itself.

The artwork has been presented in London, New York, and Los Angeles, and just won the best of show Gold Lion at the Venice Biennale 02011. The Guardian called it “a masterpiece for our times.” If you’re in Los Angeles this July, or Venice between now and November, don’t miss it.

For more, here’s a clip from BBC News.

Here’s a beautiful time-lapse of a pulsing, breathing, flowing superorganism:

Mindrelic – Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

(via stellar)

The work of Stewart Brand, founding editor of Whole Earth Catalog and Long Now President, is featured in Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968 – 1974 at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art through July 26th.

In 1968, Stewart Brand founded an alternative information service and distribution system within a single publication, called the Whole Earth Catalog. Influenced by the work of Buckminster Fuller, the catalog developed into an extensive reference tool for designing the environment, living spaces, and new media practices. In sections titled “Understanding Whole Systems,” “Shelter and Land Use,” “Communications,” “Community,” and “Nomadics,” the catalog publicized a compendium of useful resources, with a primary focus on books. Drawing from the holdings of the MoMA Library, this exhibition surveys many of these publications and gives a history of the catalog itself.

The New York Times says of the exhibition:

So maybe the time is ripe for a deep and wide reconsideration of the Whole Earth vision. In its generous embrace of theory and practice and its range from the cosmic to the mundane it epitomized the best impulses of American democracy. It was and still might be a great tool for thinking about how to rehabilitate our sadly distressed world.

Much of the show can be viewed on the companion exhibition site.

Maarten Lens-FitzGerald got in touch recently to let us know that someone had created a layer within the Layar augmented reality platform that geo-tags a film shown by Rick Prelinger at his annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco event.

The film was created shortly before San Francisco’s devastating earthquake by placing an early video camera on the front of a streetcar as it rolled along Market Street toward the city’s Ferry Terminal.

If you open the Layar browser on a smartphone while standing along the route that camera took over a century ago, you’ll see what it’s operator saw – dirt & dust, horses & buggies, people on bikes and even a few early automobiles.

It’s kind of like a real-life Wayback Machine!

Smart Night Out, the new art happening from Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, explores the theme of Quiet on its inaugural night of Saturday May 28, 02011 from 7:00pm to 11:30pm. This event is free to attend when you RSVP.

Long Now was invited by YBCA to curate the screening room and we asked artist Steve Rowell to create a piece around his recent trip to the Svalbard Seed Vault with Long Now’s Executive Director Alexander Rose.

Incidental Soundscapes: High and Low by Steve Rowell

Internationally exhibited artist Steve Rowell assembled field recordings from a recent trip to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This remote location proved to have a surprising soundtrack both natural and engineered. Kick back in our Screening Room with his audio-visual exploration of these aural landscapes and ponder the meaning of silence. An intermission piece will feature incidental ambience of the supersonic airspace of the Mojave desert.

At the Smart Night Out, inquisitive participants can dance to the Silent Disco, interact with the exhibits and building through a series of Movement Meditations, work with a deaf choreographer and experience more art and activities that expand around this theme of Quiet.

Also included is free entry into the three Visual Arts exhibits Song Dong, Euan Macdonald, and Daily Lives, food carts and a cash bar.

Nearly 400 bird species can be found in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the state of California, there are more than 600 species. North America has 2,000. Zooming all of the way out, the earth is home to over 10,000 bird species. Many bird enthusiasts focus their attention on local avian populations–but, of course, the term ‘local’ is relative. Mike Bergin is the founder of 10,000 Birds and his approach is global in scope.

There are approximately 10,000 bird species on this beautiful planet. Here at 10,000 Birds we expect to not only see but eventually photograph or write about every single one! (We’ll get there eventually…)

Anyway, we have a serious interest in photography to go with our interest in birds and bird identification. We’ve consequently amassed a rather large collection of photos, and rather than hide them away on our hard-drives we’ve decided that you may like to see them instead.

Few people are this truly holistic in their endeavors, but technology is increasing the plausibility of such earth-wide projects. An earlier post on this blog featured two efforts that would make good company for 10,000 Birds: the Encyclopedia of Life and International Barcode of Life. The Encyclopedia of Life seeks to create a single database with organized and concise information about every life form on the planet. The International Barcode of Life champions an efficient method of identifying species through DNA sequencing.

As massively parallel sequencing technologies become more available, the barcode library will enable sophisticated environmental monitoring that uses living organisms as integrators of environmental change and as early warnings of damage. Large-scale, automated monitoring of species presence and abundance in the world’s oceans, inland waters, agro-ecosystems, and plantations will soon be routine.

Open collaboration and creative technologies provide opportunities for people to collectively analyze vast amounts of information, and through these efforts we get clearer glimpses of the big picture, the Big Here. 10,000 Birds is stitching their big picture out of a heck of a lot of smaller ones, and their glimpse of this beautiful hummingbird in Ecuador is lovely.

The second season of FUTURESTATES has been released, a film series featuring visions and stories of the “not-too-distant future.” Participants imagined narratives based on scenarios such as extreme climate change with environmental refugees, gated communities that regulate the genetic makeup of their offspring, and the proliferation of software that charts our likes and dislikes, “creeping into the human heart and soul.” J.P. Chan’s “Digital Antiquities” tells the tale of a man with a cryptic old device (a CD) that his mother left him and the woman who helps him retrieve its data. The story takes place in a time when all information is constantly uploaded to ‘the cloud,’ rendering nearly all of our present media obsolete. Interestingly, this time is fast approaching: the year is 2036. Chan writes:

My own experience with data loss made me think about how easy it is to lose digital memories and what it might mean for our culture — and ourselves — when that loss happens billions of times over. What memories will be preserved of our era, when the media itself is so fragile? Stone tablets survive millenia to tell us stories of civilizations that left few other traces. If the far-more-frail hard drive is the stone tablet of our times, we’re in big trouble.

In the future, virtually all of our lives will be recorded and presumably stored safely online somewhere. Recovering data from personal media like floppy disks, hard drives, optical discs, and memory chips will be an extinct business. But right now, we’re creating lots of digital memories on these media but only haphazardly preserving them. How will we feel about this in a few decades when much of it is gone?

You can watch “Digital Antiquities” here, and also check out FUTURESTATES’ Predict-o-Meter where you can weigh in on the future and see other users’ predictions.