See also: Das Rad.

(Sent in by Mark Watkins, via BoingBoing)

Now and When: Installation detail for Proof by Margaret Tedesco & Matt Borruso

The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery is hosting a series of conversations about time in conjunction with their current show Now and When. On Wednesday August 18th, Alexander Rose will join Jeannene Przyblyski of the San Francisco Bureau of Urban Secrets in a discussion of “linear and not so linear” approaches to time.

There are 30 seats available for this talk and they must be reserved by calling or emailing the SFAC Gallery (415.554.6080 or sfac.gallery@sfgov.org) no later than 24 hours prior to the event date.

The event will run from 6:30pm to 8:00pm and will be held in the SFAC Main Gallery at 401 Van Ness at McAllister inside the Veteran’s Building.

From the event website:

Curated and moderated by Gallery Assistant Shannon Green, these conversations will introduce the artists’ work in the exhibition and the guests’ demarcation of time in their own professions. As the events unfurl, the discussion will be opened up for audience participation. The aim of this programming is to make the art of Now and When and ideas of time more accessible and meaningful.

Radoslav Zilinsky’s 2007 artwork “The World”

A stunning painting of a possible future (or present depending on how you look at it)… walled cities of techno-utopia surrounded by the rest of the world living in the middle ages.  Here is a link to the large version on Zilinzky’s site.  (Found via Coolvibe.)

Not only does this amazing stop-motion film document a huge swath of history (all of it, really) – it looks like it took a huge swath of history to make.  Thousands of photographs of graffiti evolving and interacting with its environment depict the development of life in the universe to create “Big Bang Big Boom: an unscientific point of view on the beginning and evolution of life… and how it could probably end.”

BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

If this theme piques your interest, by the way, you might want to check out one of our upcoming Seminars About Long-term Thinking featuring Martin Rees: “Life’s Future in the Cosmos.”

Attendees at The Academy of Science debate whether or not to try the water from 02030

Long Now Research Fellow – Stuart Candy (along with cohorts) recently presented the Plastic Century futures project at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The project gives you the option of drinking water from decades ranging from 01910 (no plastic) to a hypothetical 02030 (mostly plastic).   After sampling each  I found them all to be fine except for 01960 which was a bit bitter for some reason…

Dinosaur Comics, June 11th 02010, (click for full size)

Same images every time but different words, what a stupid comic right?  Wrong. Dinosaur Comics are super awesome.  This particular one is awesome in a Long Now way.  Enjoy.

Fossilization normally takes millions of years, but artist Austin Houldsworth has created a machine that he hopes will accelerate that process enough to take only a few months.  The piece is called Two Million & 1AD and it’s located in Tatton Park in Cheshire, England.

The machine replicates the natural process of Petrification, which is a form of fossilisation where organic matter is replaced with minerals. It does this by saturating the water with an extremely high quantity of minerals in the form of Calcium and Magnesium. A small quantity of sulphuric acid has been added to the tank containing the limestone; this replicates the natural acidity of rain water which reacts with the alkaline limestone and forms Calcium Sulphate (commonly known as gypsum), which is a very water soluble mineral (compared with Calcium carbonate).

Members of the public pump the water from the two tanks at the bottom to the header tank located at the top of the machine. This water then slowly trickles through the containers which house the pineapple and Partridge – and during the Biennial (hopefully) will transform the organic objects into stone.

- (Austin Houldsworth, we make money not art)

For thousands of years emperors, clerics, nobles and kings all over the world have erected slabs of stone called stelae as markers to indicate a boundary, either phsyical or temporal.  They commemorate battles won, loved ones lost, borders, holocausts, and laws.  Some stelae have been vital sources of information on past societies; many still stand after millenia.

Outside the Everhart Museum in Scranton, four ceramic stelae have been erected by an artist named Jordan Taylor.  The four-ton blocks will sit in Nay Aug Park, marking the entrance to the museum, until they erode “and follow the watershed as far as the Chesapeake Bay, back to the lie of the land”.  Rather than a king’s accomplishment or a claimed territory, they mark the absence of boundary, the dissolution of moment and material into matter and spacetime.

“I look forward to watching the stelae from season to season, year to year. They are sentinel. Yet we too share that role. We will keep watch over them, bearing witness to their transformation from art back into the earth.”

- Cara A. Sutherland, Executive Director, Everhart Museum

Our newest board member and recent Seminar speaker David Eagleman has published his very Long Now Mothers Day essay over at Slate.  Happy Mothers Day to the long line of Mothers who brought us all here!

In honor of Mother’s Day, I’m going to spend five seconds thinking about each woman in the proud line of matriarchs who brought me here.My mother left a biology career to become a politician and a painter. She gave up cigarettes in her 30s, shoulders unreconciled issues with her father, and is unable to operate any video player newer than a VCR. The soup cans in her pantry are always in neat alignment. She is tall and striking, and was once cast in a commercial to play Cleopatra.

At the five-second mark I turn to thinking about my maternal grandmother. She became a locally famous grower of roses when her husband invested in oil fields and lost the bet. She died in her late 60s, drifting in a deep dementia and believing that she was standing in the snow-covered barn of her childhood.

At 10 seconds I consider my great-grandmother. Her beauty stopped traffic when she was younger, and she struggled for two-thirds of her life with the slow fading of that power. She wore makeup and expensive clothing and clung through two husbands to the habits of pretty women. She was terrific at playing the harmonica.

My great-great-grandmother (great² grandmother) was… (continued over at Slate)

History of Major Contagion Map by Haisam Hussein

Long Now member #744 Jason Martin sent in links to a few maps by Lapham’s Quarterly each of which depicts a different view of deep time.  Click on the maps shown here to see the larger versions.

Telling Tales Map by Haisam Hussein

The Art of Knowing graphics by Joyce Pendola

As reported on Laughing Squid SepiaTown is “A Collaborative Urban Time Machine”

SepiaTown lets you use your computer or mobile device to see what the very spot you’re standing on looked like decades or centuries ago.

A Google Maps mash-up, SepiaTown allows users to upload and geotag vintage photos of urban landscapes and then serves them up for others to view.  There’s even a “then/now” feature that juxtaposes the old shot with the current Street View:

]]> http://blog.longnow.org/2010/04/08/lost-landscapes-of-google-maps/feed/ 2 http://blog.longnow.org/2010/04/05/solar-beat/ http://blog.longnow.org/2010/04/05/solar-beat/#comments Mon, 05 Apr 2010 11:03:12 +0000 Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander http://blog.longnow.org/?p=1876

Click the image above to see the Solar Beat page aand make sure your sound is turned on.

Solar Beat is a project by White Vinyl Designs that uses a virtual Orrery as a type of music box.  Turn on your sound and click the image above to see what type of music our solar system makes…  (thanks to Chris Baldwin for sending this in)

Death Bear visits clients in their homes and accepts love letters, old photos, anything they can't just throw away. The man behind the mask, Nate Hill, says he wants to create art that helps people. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times / March 18, 2010)

At The Long Now Foundation we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to preserve information and artifacts from our increasingly ephemeral culture.  A piece in the LA TImes sent in this morning by board member Paul Saffo reminded me of a point that Brian Eno brought up at our first conference on digital preservation: the case for forgetting.

If we were able to save and recall absolutely everything, we have to remember that sometimes the past can be as stifling as it is informative.  Many great inventions for instance may never have been created if the inventors actually knew how many great minds failed before them.  But aside from innovation there is also the emotional side to memory.  This story about the Death Bear project reminds us that there is plenty that we may want to forget, and that by doing so we can liberate our future. (excerpt below)

And while most of his calls are from the lovelorn, others hint at tragedies greater than being dateless on Valentine’s Day.

One man gave Hill a photo of himself and his ex-girlfriend on a beach and said they had served in the Army together. Then he gave Hill his military dog tags. Finally, he handed Hill a bullet.

“He almost started to cry,” said Hill, whose clients know him only as Death Bear and never see his face. “I started walking away and started to break down. I thought maybe something happened to her. Maybe she got shot, maybe she killed herself.”

But Hill never presses clients for details. As a bear, his job is not to make conversation. (read the full article)

Art project in progress A History of the Sky features lots and lots of time-lapse videos of the sky that are synchronized so that they’re all showing the same time of day.  Ken Murphy is the artist that created it and he hopes to one day manifest all the data he’s collecting as a video installation that’s always displaying the skies of the last 365 days.  The project was recently featured at the Exploratorium, but it’s still in a need of a home for the installation.

Here’s how it works.

If you’d like to see an installation in person, here are several upcoming opportunities:

• Maker Faire UK, at the Life Science Centre Planetarium, Newcastle UK: March 13-14, 2010
• Google I/O Conference After Hours Party, at Moscone West, San Francisco: May 19, 2010
• Bay Area Maker Faire, at the San Mateo County Event Center: May 22-23, 2010

• Long Now and Global Lives Project celebrates the opening of its first installation on Friday February 26th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.  The event is free, but you’ll want to RSVP so you can be sure to get in.  The installation will be up on Saturday and Sunday over the weekend as well.
  
• Beth Noveck on “Transparent Government”  Thursday March 4, 02010 at 7:30 pm at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats free, or you can purchase tickets for $10 each.

• Alan Weisman on “World Without Us, World With Us.” Wednesday February 24 (Thanks for coming this event went great)