This is a wonderful find by “America Found: A Snapshot History” blog. It is someone’s snap shots they took of their TV as one of the Apollo missions took place. There is something quaint and lovely about taking pictures of your television to document an important moment. Pre VCR, pre DVD, pre TiVo but still captures the essence of the broadcast.
Ben Keating sent me a link to this nifty IBM project called History Flow for tracking community edited documents on line life. My bet is that time-line projects like this are going to become more commonplace in the web 2.0 world.
history flow is a tool for visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors. In its current implementation, history flow is being used to visualize the evolutionary history of wiki* pages on Wikipedia.
For those of you in the SF Bay Area, The Chabot Space and Science Center is hosting one of their quarterly Lunar Express Lounge evenings and debuting a cool kinetic wave piece by Margolin. Looks like a fun evening all around with music, drinks, planetarium shows etc. Through a generous offer, Long Now members can get half off the ticket price, check your email box for details, or email membership@longnow.org
Prison Uniforms, 2007
10×23 feet in six vertical panels Depicts 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005.
Sean Tafller sent me this link to Chris Jordan’s photography. Hi-res photos of e-waste and his “American Portrait” depicting everything from the number of flights per day int he US to the number of toothpicks used is a real big here, long zoom moment. Similar themes are explored in Ed Burtynsky’s work, who will be speaking in our Seminar series later this year.
Online playpen colorwars is currently running a photo competition called YoungMeNowMe, which involves submitting a shot of yourself as a youngster, together with the closest possible recreation of the same setup and pose, today.
Blogger and colorwars maestro Ze Frank posts an example: “The image to the left is me at my first showing of my art at my mom’s restaurant. The image to the right is me standing in front of two images that were created using the scribbler robot at TED 2005.”
You can look through the gallery here (competition ends 20 April).
To me there’s something quite fascinating about seeing how much people change — and don’t — with the passage of time — also seen more gradually in videos like this.
This is no less true of places, maps, and buildings…
(Thanks, Jake!)
A designer named Acanthusleaf posted in the LiveJournal Clockworker’s Guild community commentary and pics of this latest project, a gorgeous armillary ring, not unlike a very, very tiny rendition of The Clock’s Orrery:
This past week and a half, I have been obsessed with making this ring. It is a variation on one pictured in Historic Rings by Diana Scarisbrick. I would want to be her when I grow up, but I want to make the stuff as well as study and write books about it. The original opens out at a 90 degree angle to the outer ring, but I can never leave well enough alone, and I figured a shallower angle would evoke more of that armillary sphere effect that she claims was the point of the original.
This entry, I believe, signifies the official coining of the term “Clockpunk”. I think it will catch on as a meme; after all, steam is hot, but gears are gripping.
Thusly, it has also been proven that LiveJournal is not just for emo kids and bad poetry.
Computer artist Scott Blake recently launched an online project entitled “Every Barcode“, which we hereby add to our expanding gallery of long term art…
Blake’s “Every Barcode” (exhibited for the next few centuries at http://www.barcodeart.com/every_barcode.html) is an animated conceptual Net art piece representing every imaginable consumer product. Begun on February 27, 2008, it will take approximately 317 years to complete, thanks to an inherent 100 billion mathematical and visual possibilities.
The work counts through each UPC number from 00,000,000,000 to 99,999,999,999 at 10 digits per second. When the number matches an item registered in the official UPC Database it flashes the name of the manufacturer and product description for one tenth of a second.
Says Blake of his chosen theme:
My bar code art explores the process of making art with information and technology. As a computer artist I am in the business of selling 0’s and 1’s. The bar code represents automation, efficiency, and commodities. It is the universal icon for the computer revolution.
Those mystified as to how UPC (”Universal Product Code”) bar codes work may find enlightenment here.
Bar codes appeared in the mid-20th century to facilitate commercial sales and inventory, but the standardised UPC system was not invented by George Laurel until 01973, 35 years ago. Therefore the 317 years it would take Blake’s artwork to systematically and mathematically traverse the full possibility space encompassed by that design is nine times as long as it has been in existence.
Notwithstanding the project’s centuries-long future horizon, “Every Barcode” is decidedly a historical effort: a sort of temporal exploded view of the possibility space encompassed by the UPC design. And as such, it affords an interesting way of looking at where we’ve come from in terms of tagging and tracking a commercial subset of our physical world, dutifully ticking away at Blake’s website.
The piece may or may not last until 02325 — wanna longbet? — but regardless of how far into the future it endures, the practices of consumption and computation are rapidly changing today, and with them, so might we expect the technological iconography to shift, well before then.
The status of UPC as a “universal” tracking system, and hence its survival as an “icon for the computer revolution”, is currently in question as cheap, ubiquitous RFID tags (a.k.a. smart labels), touted as imminent replacements for the bar code, help usher in the age of Spimes. Futurist Bruce Sterling:
[P]retty soon, you will be wrangling Spimes.
The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story.
Spimes have identities, they are protagonists of a documented process.
[…]
We need to document the life cycles of objects. We need to know where to take them when they are defunct.In practice, this is going to mean tagging and historicizing everything. Once we tag many things, we will find that there is no good place to stop tagging.
The age of Spimes is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet: consider the maps of tracked objects, people, and vehicles — which are curiously individualised and schematic at the same time — for example here and here (”Flight Patterns”).
(Thanks to Sean Smith for passing on this link.)
Many times over the years here at Long Now we have discussed the idea of a lifetime or century clock. Betrand Planes has now made one. A clock that ticks of 84 years… (thanks for sending JD)
Nice animated time line of human migration sent to me by Paul Saffo (via Jim Warren). The coolest thing I learned was the very exciting day about 80,000 years ago when a massive volcanic eruption caused a 6 year darkening of the skies!
Artist collaborative plan b makes location-specific works and performances exploring the dynamics of narrative and time. It is composed of artist partners Daniel Rogers and Sophia 
New; Daniel has been carrying GPS trackers with him everywhere since 2003, and Sophia since 2007. They visualize GPS data by translating time-stamped coordinates into lines, and creating time-lapse animations superimposed on maps of their location. These animated visualizations allow Dan and Sophia to discover patterns in the way they move through space and time. Their animation for Berlin, of which the image left is a screenshot, reveals dense straight cords and right angles, representing routes driven daily, and light meandering squiggles, representing walks with their toddler who stops to examine each flower, dog, etc. If Dan and Sophia continued gathering data, they would see the squiggly lines became straighter and darker as their daughter grew up. Essentially, they would see their lives, as manifested in their movement patterns, changing through time.
Closer to home is Cabspotting, a project tracing San Francisco’s GPS-outfitted taxi cabs as they travel throughout the Bay Area. The image right is a screenshot of an time-lapse animation of cabs traveling through the Presidio area between 6:00am-10:00am on January 26, 02006. As with plan b, Cabspotting’s time-lapse animations of taxi cab travel represent economic, social, and cultural trends that would be otherwise invisible. And again, if animations were strung together into a time-lapse animation of time-lapse animations, it would reveal these trends changing through time.
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