Beginning on April 30th 2013, Artangel and the Longplayer Trust will be inviting thinkers and writers from a wide variety of disciplines to engage in a chain of written correspondence on the subject of long-term thinking. Unfolding slowly over time, the Artangel Longplayer Letters form a written conversation in which each conversant is both answering his or her predecessor and thinking toward his or her successor – it is a dialogical relay, very much in the spirit of the Long Conversations.

The first letter has been written by Brian Eno to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who will discuss Eno’s questions and pose his own in a letter to someone else. Eno writes,

Dear Nassim,

We’re all used to the idea that actions and thoughts take on different values when we expand the ‘picture’ within which we frame them. We realise that something which makes sense in a local frame may make less sense in a broader frame: dumping your waste in the river is fine as long as you don’t think too much about the people downriver. When you do, you might decide to stop dumping. Government ought to be the process by which such overlapping ‘bigger picture’ considerations are negotiated: good government should make empathy practical.

Indeed our geographical ‘circle of empathy’ grows decade on decade: a hundred years ago it would have been impossible to imagine millions of people raising hundreds of millions of pounds for tsunami victims on the other side of the world – people they didn’t know and would almost certainly never meet. In terms of geography, we inhabit a much bigger picture than we used to, and we sense our interconnectedness within it.

In terms of time, however, the picture seems to be narrowing. Public attention is increasingly focused on very near futures: businesses live in terror of the bottom line and the quarterly results, while politicians quake at tomorrow’s opinion polls and formulate policy in terms of them. We’ve heard tales of farmers planting olive trees or vineyards for their grandchildren to harvest, or of foresters cultivating groves of oaks to replace a chapel roof hundreds of years in the future, but by and large, we don’t do that anymore. We have less active engagement with our future than our ancestors did.

This diminishing future horizon is mirrored by an equally shrinking backwards view. We find ourselves left with prejudices and opinions that were hastily and emotionally formed at the time and not revisited and re-evaluated, drowned under a relentless stream of new stories and panics. We seem to be so thoroughly submerged by new impressions that we don’t have time to digest our own history.

To illustrate this, think about nuclear power. Start with FUKUSHIMA, that dread word. As a result of over-excited media reporting (‘great story!’ I heard one journalist say) that single word has probably condemned nuclear power for another generation, when in fact the accident produced no radiation-related deaths (and it’s doubtful that it will produce a discernable statistical blip in cancers in the future). In a conspiracy which seems almost dishonest, most Green groups failed to acknowledge this – it was too good as propaganda for them to let the facts get in the way – and of course the press never returned to the subject with any correctional follow-up. It became one of those little nuggets of received, and totally incorrect, wisdom: Nuclear=Fukushima=Catastrophe.

That received non-wisdom has persuaded Green Germany to begin decommissioning its nuclear reactors – which means more coal-fired plants. Japan too will probably turn back to coal. Coal is – even Greenpeace would agree – the worst option, though they’d claim that the gap can be filled by renewables. It can’t, not now and probably not for decades. In the meantime – and it may be a long, mean time – we’ll use coal. It’s cheap and very, very dirty.

So the real catastrophe of Fukushima is in the future, waiting for us in the form of vastly increased atmospheric CO2. An emotional over-reaction to a media storm has produced a thoroughly bad decision with longterm global consequences. It’s a classic ‘how not to’scenario. Is this how our future is going to be – lurching from one panic to another in a daze of ‘just coping’ and without the benefit of any long-picture wisdom within which to frame our actions? What would help us break out of that trap? Those olive farmers and church builders mentioned above had something we don’t: a sense that the future would quite likely be similar to the present. We, on the other hand, can be sure this won’t be the case. So the question is really this: how can we even think about designing for a future that we can’t imagine?

Where we have seriously addressed the long term at all, our efforts so far have tended towards ‘robust’ solutions: if we can’t predict the future we’ll defend against it by building super-robust structures. An example of this philosophy would be the now- abandoned megaproject for the storage of America’s nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. It was designed to resist anything the Universe could conceivably throw at it (or rather anything its designers could conceive, which is quite different). It had no adaptive capacity: it was a fortress, hardened, inert, requiring constant upkeep. But as you point out, ‘robust’ is not actually the opposite of fragile, but a point on the spectrum between ‘fragile’ and ‘anti-fragile’. The project was abandoned for political reasons and the problem of waste storage is still regarded as unsolved.

In the meantime, however, the waste is being stored: in huge drums beside the plants themselves. It’s intended as a temporary measure, but it might turn out to be a better one anyway. I think it offers a hint to the solution. Like this, the material is easily accessible should any better storage or recycling ideas appear in the next several millennia (quite likely, I should have thought…there must be Golden Swans as well as Black ones). It leaves open the possibility of easily adopting better solutions as they appear, and, because it is widely distributed rather than concentrated, it can be seen as dozens of separate experiments in waste storage being conducted simultaneously. Some of them will be better than others: evolution will take place. In that sense it seems to me a more antifragile solution. In a changing landscape what is needed is evolvability – the possibility of running a number of solutions at the same time and letting the better ones win out.

But there is a huge psychological appetite for robust solutions: it’s very natural to think that the best way to defend any system is by hardening it so it becomes unassailable. That looks like a good strategy partly because it entails more quantifiable activity on our part – and we tend to trust things if we think we’ve designed them (rather than if they’ve evolved by some process we don’t quite understand) and if we can attach lots of numbers to them. The problem is that ‘robust’ only works if the threats to the system are predictable – if you know what to harden against. The fact is, we don’t – and the hardening process itself reduces evolvability.

The nuclear issue – which I’ve used as an example in this letter – is only one of many I could have chosen. The fact is, we’re facing a lot of complex and interrelated problems which demand that we take positions now. To some extent, that position is going to have to be ‘let’s improvise’ because there’s a distinct limit to how well we can make predictions. The de facto nuclear storage arrangements currently in use in America are examples of ‘let’s improvise’ and in this case seem to be a not-too-bad arrangement. But ‘let’s improvise’ has its limitations: in fact it’s sort of what got us where we are now, in a place that’s both wondrous and problematic. We might need some other intellectual weapons in our arsenals, no matter how good we become at jamming.

Best Wishes

Brian

Future letters will be published on the Longplayer site, the Long Now blog and Artangel’s site. Please leave comments, if you have them, on the Longplayer site.

There have been many comic strips that run for a long long time, but rarely does a single entry take on a prodigious life of its own. Randall Munroe has been publishing xkcd since 02005 - not a bad run – and regularly stretches the medium’s definition. Entries can range from a single panel, to massive informational charts. From the beginning of the strip, time, and vast quantities of it, has been a common theme. One recent foray into this subject matter garnered the strip a mention, alongside Long Now, in The Economist because it’s been updating for almost a month now.

“Time,” as the piece is called, started off as a single panel with two people sitting on a beach. xkcd’s punchlines are generally hidden in the image’s title text, but in this case it simply says “Wait for it.” Every half-hour the image is updated, forming a very, very slow animation. (Most animated films, for instance, move along at 24 frames per second; this is more like .0006 frames per second.) The characters have been building a sandcastle and fortifying it against a rising sea since March 25th, 02013. You can see the whole thing, sped up, on Explain xkcd, a wiki created about the comic.

The eventual fate of the sandcastle and its creators, as well as the ultimate length of this story, remain unknown. Wait for it.

Last week Long Now board member Brian Eno unveiled two new installations at Montefiore Hospital in Hove, England. The pieces are designed to be soothing for patients in the hospital and provide a sense of respite from the harsh realities of its clinical environment. In the lobby of the new hospital, Eno’s 77 Million Paintings will be on permanent display. The artwork, like the chime sequence for the 10,000 year clock, uses generative music techniques pioneered by Eno to ensure endless unique combinations of video and music to relax the viewer.

The other work in the hospital is a quiet room for patients of the hospital that plays a new ambient album by Eno entitled Quiet Room for Montefiore. The album will only be able to be heard in the hospital, somewhat of a hurdle for serious Eno fans. News of the installation has spread quickly, and Eno’s spokesman has confirmed that four other hospital architects are currently in conversation with Eno about putting similar rooms into the hospitals they are currently building. In talking about the new turn, Eno notes that this projects flowed quite naturally from his previous works:

“It seemed a natural step for me to take as I’ve been dealing with this idea of functional music for quite a few years.”

For those that won’t be able to make it to England, Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings will also go on display in New York at the Red Bull Music Academy from May 3rd until June 2nd.

A recently released interview from Alfred Dunhill also gives a glimpse into Eno’s general philosophy and approach to art:

Former SALT speaker and professor of religion James Carse distinguishes between “finite” and “infinite” games:

“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the game.”

We might think of games as things we ‘play’ – as make-believe universes in which we might wander around for a period of time, engaged in activities that have little to no bearing on our ordinary lives. But ordinary life can, in many ways, also be thought of as a form of ‘play’. In the real world, too, we (mostly) play by the rules; we employ strategies in order to achieve certain objectives, and we interact with fellow players.

At last week’s Game Developer’s Conference, designer Jason Rohrer presented a new game that brings all these different dimensions of ‘play’ together. In response to a design challenge prompt that asked developers to come up with “the last game that humanity will ever play,” Rohrer designed a game that is both infinite and finite, lived and ‘played’ – and very, very long term.

Rohrer’s game is intended not to be played for another 2,000 years. In order to ensure its longevity, he built its board and pieces out of solid machined titanium. Anticipating a temporal language barrier between himself and future generations, he wrote the game’s instructions in the form of symbols and visual diagrams.

In order to ensure that the game would not be played before its time, Rohrer buried it at a precise but unknown location in the Nevada desert – and turned the process of finding it into a game itself. At his conference presentation, Rohrer gave each member of his audience a sheet that listed 900 unique GPS coordinates. Taken together, these handouts contained a million possible locations, only one of which corresponds to the game’s actual site. If one person checks one of these GPS coordinates each day, it is guaranteed that the game will be found within one million days, or 2,737 years.

In the last chapter of The Clock of the Long Now, Stewart Brand writes that

“Infinite games are corrupted by inappropriate finite play. Governance (infinite) is disabled when factional combat (finite) becomes the whole point instead of providing helpful debate and alternation of power. Cultures (infinite) perish when one culture seeks to eradicate another. Nature (infinite) is dangerously disrupted when commercial competition (finite) lays waste to natural cycles. Finite games flourish within infinite games, but they must not displace them, or all the games are over.” (1999:161).

Rohrer has not only taken this to heart, but has in fact taken it a step further: the finite board game he has buried in the desert is ultimately intended to be the simple starting point for the infinite game of long term thinking.

On Saturday, April 6th, the SFMOMA opened Christian Marclay’s “The Clock”.

The exhibit is a 24-hour long film that consists of snippets from the past 70 years of cinematic history–the clips all unified by the common trait of having clocks or referencing a time of day in them. To accomplish this task, Marclay hired a team of assistants that watched films and gathered sections that included a clock or watch, eventually compiling a repository of thousands of clips that were sorted by time. Marclay, whose past work has included remixing and DJ-ing, stitched together the clips into a 24-hour video collage. The scenes range from hospitals and car chases to bedrooms and restaurants, all spliced together and reminding us of the role of time in narrative.

The film is meant to be played for 24 hours straight, with the time on the clocks in the film perfectly matching the actual time of day. In this sense the entire piece is a clock itself, as well as a meditation on how we use clocks - it implicitly asks for 24 hours of your time, yet you spend the entire film literally watching the minutes tick by.

One of the central objectives of the Clock of the Long Now is to encourage people to think about deep time and how it has and will shape the world around us. In contrast, Marclay’s piece emphasizes the small moments that make up life–waiting for someone at a restaurant, realizing that you’re late to an appointment, suddenly waking up at 4am. By mashing these moments together into a full day of disorienting situations, Marclay asks us to contemplate just what it is that creates our unified sense of these moments.

The exhibit will be shown until June 2nd. During this time, there will be several 24 hour screenings for those that want see the work in its entirety.

ThePresent from m ss ng p eces on Vimeo.

The Present is a clock with an annual dial that was funded originally through Kickstarter by design collective m ss ng p eces. The inspiration for this clock seems to come from a similar place as the Clock of the Long Now.

This was one of those early blockbuster Kickstarter projects that reached 4x its fund raising goal. After a couple years figuring out how to produce these as a product, it has finally shipped and we just received ours. It has excellent build quality from what I can tell and auto-magically sets itself as soon as you put batteries into it.  Since we are only a few days away from the March Equinox ours moved directly to nearly the “3 o’clock” position in the middle of the green section (see pic below).  As we approach summer the hand will move into yellow, then reds for autumn etc.

You can get your own at http://thepresent.is/

On Thursday March 7th, Stewart Brand and Isabella Kirkland will discuss their combined efforts to keep recently extinct species from completely fading away. Kirkland has created a series of paintings featuring endangered and extinct species (on display at the David Brower Center in Berkeley – where the talk will be held) and Brand is working with molecular and conservation biologists to bring the passenger pigeon and other extinct species back to life.

Kirkland’s work, influenced by 16^th and 17^th century Dutch still lifes, includes two series of paintings, Taxa and Nova. Taxa delves into the biodiversity of past and present, featuring species that are extinct, in decline or that have been brought back from the brink of extinction. Nova, on the other hand, focuses more on the future, exploring plant and animal species discovered over the past two decades and hinting at the possibilities of what could be if we take action to protect our natural resources.

The talk is free to attend.

The David Brower Center
Conversation and book signing with Isabella Kirkland and Stewart Brand
Presented in partnership with the Long Now Foundation
Thursday, March 7
7:00 pm to 9:00 pm 
Goldman Theater

Please see the Brower Center website for details, and Brown Paper Tickets to RSVP.

Our increasingly digital culture seems to be following Moore’s law of exponential acceleration – but sometimes you need to slow things down to understand them a little better.

To that end, German artist Lorenz Potthast has built what he calls a Decelerator Helmet. It is what it sounds like: a helmet that allows you to experience the world in slow motion. It’s an aluminum sphere that fits snugly over your head; your only visual connection to the outside world is a small camera, mounted to its exterior, that transmits live, but slow-motion video to an interior display.

Potthast explains that the helmet is meant to “decouple … personal perception from … natural timing:” it’s an experiment in engaging differently with our fast-paced world. Playing around with the flow of time, the artist suggests, exposes its important role in mediating the relationship between our inner experience and the outside world:

The decelerator gives the user the possibility to reflect about the flow of time in general, and about the relation between sensory perception, environment, and corporality in particular. Also, it dramatically visualize[s] how slowing down can potentially cause a loss of presen[ce].

For more information about this and other projects, visit Potthast’s (German-language) website here.

The Decelerator Helmet – A slow motion for Real Life from Lorenz Potthast on Vimeo.

Sixty-eight years ago, St. Petersburg was known as Leningrad, and counted as one of the Soviet Union’s largest cities. These days, those two names conjure up images of a distant past; an anachronistic, shady corner of European politics and culture.

Yet this series of images, posted a while back on Englishrussia, suggest that today’s St. Petersburg still strongly echoes its Leningrad past. Old has been transposed onto new: photographs taken during the 3-year Nazi siege of the city have been stitched into contemporary pictures of the same sites. The results bring this harrowing time in the city’s history back to life, situating the tragedy of World War II amidst contemporary landmarks.

The world has changed in the nearly seven decades since the end of WWII, and these images certainly visualize this transformation. But they also highlight an undercurrent of continuity. The seamless overlay of one era onto another suggests a kind of urban endurance and resilience, in spite of the traumatic events that history may throw its way.

Our perception of color may be a matter of optics, ophthalmology, and neurology – but the way in which we think about color is as much a matter of cultural history.

In a pair of blog posts, the online design magazine Imprint offers an illustrated history of the color wheel. From enlightenment thinkers such as Jacob Christian Schäffer and Moses Harris, to German author Goethe, mathematician Tobias Mayer, and painter Albert Henry Munsell, these articles trace the very colorful history of human efforts to categorize colors and theorize on the relationships between them. The world of science and art may by now have moved on to more systemized – and scientifically rigorous – categorization systems, but color wheels are by no means obsolete, the author concludes:

However inadequate, scientifically speaking, it is to describe the color-spectrum using a wheel-shaped model, there’s an irresistible fitness about marrying circles with color. As a geometric figure, circles possess a certain strength, a self-contained quality in which a smooth, unperturbed body can be imagined to hold an entire universe. Sometimes the pod will crack, spilling its contents with rampant energy, or maybe the circle holds indefinitely. For an entity as slippery and ubiquitous as color, only a circle can be imagined as a perfect enough shape to contain all of it.

And indeed, if you have an eye for it, color wheels can be found anywhere.