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.

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.

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!

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.

This National Park Service spectrogram, from the Western Soundscape Archive, visually represents the sounds heard at a particular site over the course of 24 hours.

Sound is fleeting. Unless it is recorded while it occurs, it can never be heard again. As the earth evolves, species come and go, ecosystems change or are destroyed, and urban landscapes transform; when organisms and ways of life go extinct, their sounds disappear with them. We record music, lectures, and performances, but it is relatively uncommon to record our everyday activities and environment. There are, however, a few efforts to do just that.

High Country News recently published a profile of Jeff Rice, the founder of the Western Soundscape Archive. The archive hosts a growing collection of audio recordings of the flora and fauna of the Western United States.

The archive now represents close to 800 species — amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals — even some invertebrates. Scientists, educators, students and nature enthusiasts can download podcasts or stream audio files free of charge. Rice sees the loss of species and habitats as a driving force behind his work. “We are experiencing a new ‘silent spring’ across the globe and in our own backyards,” he says. “Not only is it a marker of what we’re losing on an important ecological level, but it’s also a loss of our heritage.”

The collection also provides access to National Park Service acoustical monitoring. These take the form of spectrograms–images that show, over 24-hour periods, the relative prevalence of bird songs and airplanes, crickets and cars. They provide information about a region’s biodiversity as well as the impact of anthropogenic noise on its ecosystems.

Aporee is another sound collection, but with a less specific sonic target. The aporee ::: maps project encourages people to record the sounds around them and upload them to the site. All recordings are plotted on google maps, where anyone can click on them to listen. The project is described on Aporee’s website:

It develops from the insight that it is basically impossible to map the complexity of todays [sic] public spaces. Against the background of an increasing awareness of spatial aspects in media and the popularity and presence of visual geographies like google maps, the idea was to connect sound and space, and to create a cartography which focusses [sic] solely on sound, and open it to the public as a collaborative project. Meanwhile it contains 1000s of recordings from numerous urban, rural and natural environments, showing the sonic complexity of these environments, as well as the different perception and artistic perspectives related to sound, space and places. Furthermore, it’s an exciting playground for experiments with sound and mobile media.

A sound archive could someday form a very engaging and informative part of a library dedicated to describing the human experience as it has evolved through time. Think of a museum exhibit on the ocean that includes short sound clips: rolling waves, the incessant squawking of seagulls, the call of an elephant seal. The portrayal instantly becomes more vivid, more real. For a future human to grasp what it meant to live in the 21st century, it could be quite useful to have a soundtrack with examples of car traffic, a busy farmer’s market, or perhaps even the soft chirping and buzzing heard in a pine forest on a sunny morning, out of earshot from human civilization.

Click here to hear the Western Soundscape Archive’s recording of a bark beetle (one species of which is responsible for the current epidemic that has killed vast swaths of trees in the Rockies).

Long Now’s Alexander Rose recently visited the Svalbard Seed Vault with Steve Rowell, who uploaded to Aporee this recording of a Svalbardian windstorm. Make sure you’ve got a warm blanket with you.

A History of the World in 100 Seconds from Gareth Lloyd on Vimeo.

Thanks to Long Now research fellow Stuart Candy for sending this in:

Many wikipedia articles have coordinates. Many have references to historic events. Me (@godawful) and Tom Martin (@heychinaski) cross referenced the two to create a dynamic visualization of Wikipedia’s view of world history. Watch as empires fall, wars break out and continents are discovered.

This won “Best Visualization” at Matt Patterson’s History Hackday in January, 2011. To make it, we parsed an xml dump of all wikipedia articles (30Gb) and pulled out 424,000 articles with coordinates and 35,000 references to events. Cross referencing these produced 15,500 events with locations. Then we mapped them over time.

More information and datasets: ragtag.info/​2011/​feb/​2/​history-world-100-seconds/

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We heard last week that some “Long Now Graffiti” showed up on the sidewalk out in front of the Pixar animation studios in Emeryville California.  A friend just sent in pictures of it…  I assume no one wants to come forward to tell us more about it, but I would really love to know why it only goes to the year 10,000.  Why not 12011?

… and this one in Berlin:

These Victorian infographics take a beautiful, hand-drawn approach to the presentation of various geographic and astronomical data.  The image above was published in 1854 and compares various mountains and river systems side-by-side.

Don’t miss the Tableau de L’Histoire Universelle, which represents nations and empires as rivers flowing through history and plenty more at BibliOdyssey.

(thanks to a new member Marianna!)

This is my hands-down favorite clock for the iPad, and could well be the coolest astronomic/civil clock I’ve ever seen: http://emeraldsequoia.com/eo/

Emerald Observatory has everything a time geek could ever want, plus everything an astro geek would want, all in a stunningly elegant interface.

[decription below from Emerald]
Emerald Observatory displays a wealth of astronomical information all on one screen, in a unique but understandable format.

• Times of rise and set for the Sun, the Moon, and the 5 classical planets
• Times of the beginning and ending of twilight
• Heliocentric orrery (display of the planets in orbit around the Sun)
• Altitude and azimuth for the same bodies (one body at a time)
• Current phase and apparent orientation and relative size of the moon
• Current regions of day and night on a world map
• The Equation of Time, solar time, UTC time, and sidereal time
• Month, day, year, and leap-year indicator
• Daily alarm
• Displayed times are synchronized via NTP to “atomic clock” standard
• Uses iPad location, or the latitude and longitude may be set manually

A setting is available to allow the display to stay on continuously.

Tap on the display to move forward by a month, day, year, or minute.

If you are having any trouble with the application whatsoever, please see our FAQ on the support page listed below and then contact us through that page if your problem is not resolved. We take pride in responding promptly to all support email requests.