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)

Rosetta Project Director Laura Welcher recently took part in a segment on The History Channel’s Life After People series.

In an episode titled “Crypt of Civilization,” Laura discusses the Rosetta Disk and The 10,000 Year Clock.   

The central question of the series is “How long would it last?” The series explores various materials, systems and structures built by humans to determine their durability sans maintenance as well as natural systems and how they might flourish or decline without human intervention.

“Crypt of Civilization” focuses on time capsules, vaults and other attempts to create long-lasting caches of materials or data.  Laura explores some of the unique challenges in designing artifacts like the Disk and Clock to last thousands of years while the show’s producers vividly illustrate them.

You can watch the series on its website (though the “Crypt of Civilization” episode isn’t available yet).

]]> http://blog.longnow.org/2010/02/04/rosetta-and-long-now-on-life-after-people/feed/ 1 http://blog.longnow.org/2010/02/04/global-lives-project-opening-celebration/ http://blog.longnow.org/2010/02/04/global-lives-project-opening-celebration/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:35:53 +0000 Austin Brown http://blog.longnow.org/?p=1602

Dedicated to bringing together video documentation of the daily lives of disparate global citizens, the Global Lives Project celebrates the opening of its first installation on February 26th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.  This opening is sponsored in part by the Long Now Foundation through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The Global Lives Project’s World Premiere installation will be on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from February 26 – June 20, 2010! The exhibit is part of an artist residency that will evolve over four months. We will be showing, for the first time ever, our series of ten 24-hour videos of daily life from around the planet.

Join Global Lives, Long Now and the YBCA for the opening night celebration on February 26th from 7:30pm to 11:30pm.  There will be a cash bar and music from San Franciscans Kid Kameleon, Chief Boima, and Tinker.  Global Lives producers and directors will be there to discuss the project.

The event is free, but you’ll want to RSVP so you can be sure to get in!

As you may remember, Longplayer is a project by Jem Finer: a composition designed to last 1,000 years.  Along with a live performance of portions of the composition last year, a Long Conversation was held that lasted for 12 hours:

In parallel with a live performance in the Roundhouse’s Main Space, the Artangel Longplayer 2009 Conversation took place in the Studio Theatre. Writer Jeanette Winterson began and ended the 12-hour talking marathon of twenty leading writers, filmmakers, scientists, academics and technology activists, inspired by the philosophical implications of long time.

MP3 audio of that conversation is now available.

Those of you in the general vicinity of Berlin should check out the next round of the Long Conversation at the Transmediale Futurity Now! Festival on February 5th.  The following evening (Feb. 6th) will feature presentations by Bruce Sterling and our very own Alexander Rose on the topic of Atemporality.

Great piece in the Washington Post on the future of ancient books in Timbuktu.

“A sort of ancient-book fever has gripped Timbuktu in recent years” as outsiders encounter large, family-owned collections of ancient manuscripts which remain in private hands. at the same time, Timbuktu’s residents “hope to lure the world to a place known as the end of the Earth by establishing libraries for visitors to see their centuries-old collections of manuscripts.”  For those who do not sell their collections privately, small libraries are in bloom across the city.

Yet with instructions from ancestors to preserve ancient books within families, there is a reluctance to place them in libraries currently being built for the very same purpose. “Many owners refuse to part with their books… but they struggle to raise funds to restore or display them.”

It is interesting that that so many families were able to preserve these manuscripts for so long.  What caused this culture of long term preservation?

Consider the Library of Alexandria, which Stewart Brand covers in Clock of the Long Now. It experienced at least four fires, two from “collateral damage” by Ptolemy VIII (88 B.C.E) and Julius Caesar (47 B.C.E.), and two from religions on the rise (Christianity and Islam).

The ability to preserve these books over many centuries so far rests with families intent on honoring and adhering to requests from ancestors, a rather small and fragile model compared to the infrastructure needed to build a great library. Yet it is possible that a family with instructions from ancestors is, in some sense, a better library than a library itself.

Six hundred years ago, Timbuktu was packed with university students (at about 25,000, the size of a modestly large mid-western university these days) and a constant flow of merchants. It was a nexus of trade and intellectual life on the continent which then slowed. Perhaps because it did not intersect with the dramatic tension between three continents, like Alexandria, it was less prone both to collateral damage *and* the request by military or religious leaders to dispose of books not relevant to the prevailing winds. In any case, this slowing may well have ensured greater preservation over time.

It’s also confirmation that a library in the middle of a continent–away from the intersection of countries, military conquests and ascendant religious movements–is a really good idea.    With “ancient-book fever” now in Timbuktu, some combination of library and family models will have to preserve them.

A little while ago Clock designer and Long Now founder Danny Hillis came across this podcasted radio show by former president Thomas Jefferson.  We were all surprised to find him giving radio broadcasts given he passed away in 01826 (on the 4th of July I might add).  But what was most surprising was to find that one of his episodes discussed the Clock of the Long Now (Listen to the MP3).  Danny listened with great interest as Jefferson discussed our project, clocks and time in general, and decided to send in a letter.  And just the other day Jefferson discussed the letter at length on the show (Listen to that MP3).  As you would expect, Jefferson has an encyclopedic knowledge of new and old world technology, clocks and mechanica.  It makes for fun listening, happy holidays.

Below appears a set of images of a 2009 work called “E Pluribus Unum” — “Out of many, one” (an important U.S. motto).

Jordan’s website explains:

This large scale mandala depicts the names of one million organizations around the world that are devoted to peace, environmental stewardship, social justice, and the preservation of diverse and indigenous culture.

The actual number of such organizations is unknown, but Paul Hawken’s “Blessed Unrest” project estimates the number at somewhere between one and two million, and growing. If the lines in this piece were straightened out, they would make an unbroken line of names, in a ten point font, twenty seven miles long.

Of course, to read the statistics is one thing; actually to image them is another. This remarkable visualisation helps bring home the scale of social transformation, at the institutional level, which we are currently undergoing.

Paul Hawken’s Seminar About Long-term Thinking that deals with the themes of Blessed Unrest can be found here.

[Images: Chris Jordan]

Long Now friend and supporter Ken Wilson sends in this awesome concept for the Stockholm Library.  This design seems like it would lend itself well to a 10,000 year library…

The image above is a rendering by a team of students at the Architecture School of Paris La Seine. You can see the un-textured model below and read how the design was generated over at CG Society.

We have updated our online store with some new items for the holiday season…

Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings is a generative art piece that will take thousands of years to fully take in – the software slowly layers and combines several hundred original paintings in an ever-evolving kaleidoscopic experience.  You can also hear experiments by Mr. Eno for the Chime Generator on “January 07003“. Pick up a Long Now embroidered twill baseball hat or a 100% cotton screen-printed T-shirt (printed locally by Ape Do Good of San Francisco) featuring CAD drawings of Long Now prototypes.  We also have short-sleeve button down embroidered work shirts.  And don’t forget to check out the Rosetta Disk DVD, a simulation of viewing our actual Rosetta Disk under a microscope that includes linguistic data on over 1,500 human languages.

We have meaningful gifts for anyone on your list, as we work hard to ensure that the wide variety of items in our store represent the ideas we promote. Visit our store at Fort Mason in San Francisco, 7 days a week, or check us out online.

The Annosphere tells time, but more usefully, it presents time. It shows you sunrise and sunset, the start of spring and the winter solstice. It lets you see on your desk what you can’t see in the world: the steady pace of time, the subtle day to day changes in sunlight and shadow, the cycles that run through each year.

The Annosphere is emblematic of what Mr. Goodman calls an intuitive grasp of time – time that is told by instinct, season and cultural benchmark, rather than being parceled out in minutes and seconds. He tells an illustrative story: Once, in a hotel in Europe, he noticed that the shower knob was demarcated in degree readings. He got to musing on the fact that he had no idea, in degrees, how hot he liked his shower. “The shower had degree readings on the knob, but who knows the exact temperature they like their shower? The right way to set a shower is where it’s comfortable, the right way to measure time is the same.”

“Can you wake yourself up at a specific time without an alarm clock?” He adds, “It’s easy!”

Mr. Goodman once told his wife to set her alarm for 8:15, and he would wake her up at 8am. For him, time is just as much an art of observation as it is ticking off minutes and seconds. Through having a grasp on what the room looked like at certain times of day, coupled with knowing things like his own sleep habits and other cues for his sense of timing, he was able, much to his wife’s disbelief, to get her to work on time without the use of the alarm clock.

He makes a note of other intuitive methods for judging time – there is apocryphal story that states the day that farmers let the boars and sows breed, they would notch their fingernails at the point they emerged from their skin. When the notch had grown all the way out, the sow was ready to give birth. Likewise, cultural celebrations such as the lunar new year and mid-autumn festivals encourage people to think about the changing points of the year, and prepare mentally and physically.

After all this explanation of gut feeling for time and representing it in mechanical form, the irony that lies with the construction of the Annosphere is the fact that Mr. Goodman must use, and enjoys using, highly precise machinery to build something whose measurements are, at best, approximate. Sometimes, the machines he uses to build the end result are far more complex than the Annosphere itself. To Goodman, “The practice is a meditation.”

Also meditative is watching the Annosphere perform its calculations, which, says Goodman, is also a part of the process – “Writing down the instructions for a thing is not as easy as seeing the thing go – people should be able to interpret the machine on their own.” Like the Clock Of The Long Now, the Annosphere is an elegant bridge between the natural and the mechanical; a reminder of an inherent human ability that is often overlooked in a world of rush hours, work schedules and carefully boxed out minutes and seconds.

Via BoingBoing this morning comes a wonderful ambient music generating clock of the stars.  Jim Bumgardner created this piece and explains it thusly:

To make this, I downloaded public data from Hipparcos, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 1989 that accurately measured over a hundred thousand stars. The data I downloaded contains position, parallax, magnitude, and color information, among other things.

I used this information to plot the brightest stars, and cause them to revolve about Polaris (the North Star) very slowly, as the stars appear to do. Like the night sky, this is a sidereal time clock — it takes nearly 24 hours for the stars to fully rotate. You’ll notice some familiar constellations, such as the Big Dipper in there. As the stars cross zero and 180 degrees, indicated by the center line, the clock plays an individual note, or chime for each star. The pitch of the chime is based on the star’s BV measurement (which roughly corresponds to color or temperature). The volume is based on the star’s magnitude, or apparent brightness, and the stereo panning is based on the position on the screen (use headphones to hear it better).

Enjoy!

For all the Long Now and Brian Eno fans down in the LA area -  The University Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach is presenting an installation of Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings through December.

The LA Times has a good description of the installation and brief interview with Mr. Eno:

It consists of a wall of 12 computer-operated monitors of varying dimensions, displaying a procession of constantly mutating images that group and regroup into a virtually limitless series of configurations. The protean “paintings” are accompanied by Eno’s ambient original score.

Eno also designed the installation’s computer software and hand-drew the interchangeable images on slides, using etching tools and paintbrushes. Most of the configurations are abstract, but Eno occasionally added variety by tossing in found art culled from magazines and elsewhere.

…

“The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples’ attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation,” Eno says. “I point to this work as a counter-problem. I think it’s a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.”

The University Art Museum’s telephone number is 562.985.5761 and they are open Tuesdays through Sundays from noon to 5pm, except Thursdays, on which they stay open until 8pm.

Long Now presented the North American premiere of the piece in 02007 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Long Now London Meetup member Adam Becker sent in a write-up describing Jem Finer’s Longplayer Live event in the UK:

Jem Finer’s 1000 year composition Longplayer moved from virtual instruments to real ones on Saturday, September 12th at the Roundhouse in London. He amassed a collection of musicians to perform an excerpt from the piece over the course of the day, filling the main performance space of the venue with the pulsing, metallic voices of Tibetan singing bowls for 1000 minutes.

Dressed in blue-gray army surplus style uniforms, the musicians gave the place the look of a Bond villain’s lair, some kind of mysterious, devious activity going on. Even so, the result was child-friendly, plenty of young ‘uns running around, or falling asleep in their parents’ arms, Zenned-out by the chiming bowls.

Downstairs something less abstract was happening – a series of conversations (each 36 minutes long) between a host of scientists, journalists, historians, mathematicians and more.  These had their own ebb and flow, some pairings warming up right before they were gonged out, others getting straight into it, clearly having researched their partner/opponent and wanting to have some fun.

The talks provided a great accompaniment to the music above, the participants clearly aware that this event was somewhat to do with long-term thinking, but not hammering the point.  Upstairs again, and the music played into the night, sonically and visually elegant, and one of the most unusual things to be found in London on a Saturday night.

(Some beautiful photos here: http://longplayer.posterous.com/)