The Long Now Foundation will be co-presenting a conversation with artist and naturalist Laura Cunningham on Wednesday, December 5th as part of her fall 02012 exhibit at the David Brower Center’s Hazel Wolf Gallery. Cunningham’s background in paleontology, wildlife biology and natural science illustration coalesce in her beautiful book “A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California,” which depicts scenes of California ecology as they would have appeared centuries ago – what she calls Old California. She ventures even deeper into the past in some cases, such as in her painting “40,000 Years Ago on the Franciscan Valley,” which portrays Pleistocene megafauna grazing the valley floor where the San Francisco Bay now sits.

In October 02011, Laura Cunningham presented the talk “Ten Millennia of California Ecology” as one of The Long Now Foundation’s Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summary of her presentation shares some of the insights provided by her work:

Only 300 years ago the whole Bay Area was grasslands, routinely burned by the local Indians. There were oaks in the valleys, redwoods in the Berkeley Hills, and extensive oak savannahs inland. The hills were greener more of the year than now, with fire-freshened grass attracting elk, and native perennial grasses drawing moisture with their deep roots.

To see this imagery beautifully illustrated, visit her exhibit or one of the related events this fall at the Brower Center in Berkeley:

Laura Cunningham: Before California

The David Brower Center
Hazel Wolf Gallery (Fourth Annual Art/Act Exhibition)
Exhibit dates: September 13 02012 – January 30, 02013

Events

• Opening Reception: Thursday, September 13. 5:30-8:00 pm
  • Artist talk from 6-7
  • Wine reception 7-8
• Field Sketch Class: Saturday, September 15, 1pm – 4pm
• Great Animal Orchestra: November 8, 6:30-9:00pm
• A Landscape Flux: Wednesday, December 5, 6:30-9:00 pm

In far North-Eastern India, the power of nature is not a limitation, but a resource. This video offers a glimpse at an old tradition, but one that’s very much alive – in more ways than one!

A form of “sustainable, living architecture that will live and grow for generations,” these living bridges are a testament to long term thinking. Indeed, they’re included in the list of Long Now Locations maintained by Atlas Obscura, who write:

The root bridges, some of which are over a hundred feet long, take ten to fifteen years to become fully functional, but they’re extraordinarily strong – strong enough that some of them can support the weight of fifty or more people at a time. In fact, because they are alive and still growing, the bridges actually gain strength over time – and some of the ancient root bridges used daily by the people of the villages around Cherrapunji may be well over 500 years old.

For more photographs of these living bridges, check out Atlas Obscura’s webpage!

In the sleepy little town of Stykkishólmur, Iceland is a very interesting long-term project entitled “Vatnasafn” or “Library of Water”. The artist Roni Horn created an art installation in the old City Library in 02007. There are four parts to the exhibition, the beautiful building and view, the floor which is covered with weather terms in English and Icelandic, weather reports and finally the collection of water.

The library is a mesmerizing 24 volume collection of floor to ceiling water cylinders each containing water from one of the 24 glaciers of Iceland, including the now extinct Ok glacier).

When you enter the exhibit the towering columns of mostly clear water force you to think about these resources in a different way. We use water without even thinking, every time we wash our hands, take a shower or a bath, and cook our food. To put water on display in this way as a symbol or what we have and what we have lost makes for an interesting examination on our priorities.

Unlike a seed bank, we won’t be recreating that lost glacier from the water saved in this library. This is a collection that brings together nature from all across the Icelandic country into a single place. It shows how temporal nature and the weather can really be. With the worries of retreating and disappearing glaciers, to have a collection of a small slice of hydrological history is unique.

The website for the installation has a great map and a slideshow of where all the water came from.

Thanks, Brian!

Friend and Member of Long Now Davide Bocelli wrote in recently to update us on the story of a lost fresco painted by Leonardo Da Vinci:

This is a story about an incredible error, an act of respect, and a multicentennial game. As I wrote to Alexander Rose, some years ago the mystery of the Lost Da Vinci is still in the news after five centuries and it intends to stay there. This story is also a bridge between California and old Italy, as Maurizio Seracini is a UCSC San Diego graduate and the director of CISA3 at the San Diego’s Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology.

Seracini has been investigating the historical account that says that an original Leonardo Da Vinci, a fresco celebrating the Battle of Anghiari, is hidden by another fresco produced by Giorgio Vasari in the Salone dei Cinquecento (The Renaissance Room) in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio and tried to prove its veracity. For many years Seracini worked on replicating the techniques that Leonardo employed to paint the lost Battle of Anghiari.

As the story goes, it was Niccolò Machiavelli that signed the contract with Leonardo Da Vinci to produce a fresco celebrating the strength of the Florentine Republic. His rival Michelangelo had been commissioned to paint on the opposite wall, but this project was abandoned at the design stage when Michelangelo was called to Rome. The artists were asked to depict two outstanding victories of the Florentines: the Battle of Càscina for Michelangelo and the Battle of Anghiari for Da Vinci.

At that time, Leonardo had already painted the Last Supper at the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan using an experimental technique that made the fresco very unstable. For the Battle of Anghiari, he took an even bigger risk and tried an even more experimental technique – which ended up in a total failure. To put it in Silicon Valley terms, this turned out to be the beta version that you wouldn’t really want to go public.

Leonardo’s experiment used a special recipe that required oil, wax and fires burning for days to dry the painting surface. The paint, unfortunately, melted. Probably, the final result presaged Italian 20th century art, in a mix of Alberto Burri and Mario Schifano. But for the Renaissance standard, it was considered a total failure and it left Leonardo frustrated. He finally gave up in 1504, leaving only an exquisite, unfinished drawing on the wall. Some years later, Giorgio Vasari was asked by the new De’ Medici government to paint over Leonardo’s disaster. The painting thus disappeared and the legend of the Lost Da Vinci became history.

Vasari was asked by Cosimo I De’ Medici to paint a new scene and give a new structure to the whole room, to represent the success of the Medici on the Florentine Republic. Vasari’s respect for the genius of Leonardo was enormous, but still he was ordered to destroy the artwork. Today we know the beauty of the original drawings and sketches thanks to the transmission of copies, including the famous copy of Rubens.

The Head of a Warrior of the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford has a side that has dimensions compatible with the cartoon of La battaglia di Anghiari – it also has traces of the little holes that were made to transfer the figures to the wall. On 12th March 2012 Maurizio Seracini announced that traces of a special pigment were found in a back wall – a recipe that only Leonardo used. “It appears to be a pigment used by [him] and not by other artists.” said Seracini.

The local national authorities are supporting the endeavour to verify the presence of Da Vinci’s work. There is still a long way to go before we can make a visit to see the remains of Leonardo’s imperfect creature and probably one of his most human gestures.

Vasari may have wanted to preserve the traces of Leonardo, protecting it for the centuries to come. Over the surface of his fresco, Vasari wrote a small phrase: “Cerca Trova,” or “He who Seeks, Finds.” The words are in an area of the screen that a viewer can hardly see and not connected with the scene depicted. Maybe it’s a suggestion for people like Maurizio Seracini, as if it were a challenge.

Whatever the politicians may have ordered, Vasari decided that the genius – or the error of the genius – must not be deleted from the surface of universal memory. When you want to preserve something, maybe the best strategy is to hide it.

Thanks to Glen Michael Alessi and Valentina Scambia

Thanks, Davide!

In 1854, Sir Francis Galton published his first edition of The Art of Travel, a practical handbook for the serious globetrotter. The work offered useful tips and advice to help expeditions deal with unforeseen issues along the way, from building a makeshift shelter and navigating without a compass, to dealing with hostile “natives.” The guide quickly became a bestseller, and multiple new editions were printed in the years to follow. This was, after all, the heyday of global exploration. Fifteen years earlier, Charles Darwin had discovered new species on the Galapagos Islands; fifteen years later, David Livingstone set off to find the source of the Nile – and a few decades after that, Roald Amundsen would be the first to set foot on the South Pole.

These days, it seems that even the farthest reaches of the Earth have been mapped and surveyed: there is no more uncharted territory to be explored (not geographically, at least…). But that doesn’t mean that opportunities for discovery have disappeared.

Rachel Sussman is a photographer and modern-day explorer: armed with film and a set of cameras, she’s been traversing the globe over the past six years, in search of the world’s oldest living things. At a SALT talk last year, she shared some of the images she had collected thus far: a Caribbean brain coral, a Japanese cedar, and a Californian redwood – each more than 2,000 years old, an age that dwarfs a human lifetime. Sussman describes her project as part art, part science, and part philosophical inquiry. She combines her artist’s eye with a healthy dose of wonder:

There is something especially thrilling about meeting researchers who not only study these ancient organisms, but who are also the first to discover and identify them. It underscores what is so easy to forget in our quotidian existence: there is so much yet to be done, so much we do not know – and brushing against the arm of discovery is invigorating. – (NY Times Lens Blog, 2/21/12)

Most recently the project took her to Antarctica, where she searched not only for a 5,500 year-old bank of moss, but also for the footprints of Ernest Shackleton, a polar explorer who tried – twice – to cross the continent on foot, but failed and perished in the effort.

Where he languished, Sussman’s mission succeeded: she found and photographed not one, but two ancient mosses growing on the Antarctic islands where Shackleton’s journeys ended. In a travelogue that was picked up by both the New York Times and Brain Pickings, Sussman documented her sense of awe at this place and its history. In her writing, this continent – “frozen in deep time yet brimming with uniquely adapted life” – emerges as the image of a pristine, harsh, and untamable world; yet also as a testament to human curiosity and perseverance:

If Shackleton’s story had been written as fiction, surely someone would criticize it for having an unrealistic number of obstacles. He had returned to South Georgia five years after his harrowing circuit, and, as if living on borrowed time, died of a massive heart attack the very night he arrived. He died having no idea he shared Elephant Island with one of the oldest living things on the planet, nor that he would end his journey in South Georgia just a stone’s throw from yet another. But I have a feeling he would have approved of the quiet perseverance of these unassuming mosses, in this landscape that speaks of deep time, the power of the natural world, and the precariousness of life in its clutches. – (Brain Pickings, 4/24/12)

Hungry for information, but bored by graphs and pie charts? Then pay a visit to Information is Beautiful, a site dedicated to all things informational – and all things pretty. Its pages showcase models and graphics that reveal what can happen when data presentation is combined with an eye for design and aesthetics.

The site is now hosting the first global award competition for data visualization, and recently announced that Long Now Board member Brian Eno has joined its panel of judges.

Along with his fellow evaluators, Eno will be reviewing submissions for awards in a variety of categories, ranging from “Interactive Visualisations” to “Data Journalism” and “Information Art.” The most prestigious award, however, is reserved – quite simply – for the “Most Beautiful” design.

Submissions are due by May 31st and they’ll announce winners at the end of July.

Check out the website for more (artfully rendered) information about the competition, and a look at the submissions; the general public gets to vote, too!

It’s somewhere between performance and installation art: last month, artist Jonathan Schipper slowly – and deliberately – crashed a car into a wall. Moving at microscopic speeds, the crash took place over the course of a full month, each day inching a bit closer to its inevitable fate.

Schipper’s piece captures the destruction of speed, precisely by taking ‘speed’ out of the equation. He explains that

“We stop and look at a car wreck to reacquaint ourselves with the lost velocity, to reconnect with cause and effect. For we live increasingly in a world without effect, without impact. Speed changes meaning, changes the effects of catharsis.”

By isolating ‘effect’ and putting it on display, Schipper reminds us that life, and the things we do, make an impact on the world around us. He has created a piece of art that takes the long term not only as its medium, but as its message as well.

If you spelled out a poem in stone, at the rate of one letter – and one tile – a week, how many miles would your verse stretch across the earth in 12,012?

The Letters of Utrecht project hopes that in 10,000 years, someone will be able to answer that question.

Inspired by the Long Now Foundation and other organizations dedicated to long-term projects, The Letters of Utrecht is a very long-term poem, to be gradually written in stone in the streets of Utrecht, the Netherlands. The idea was developed by the Million Generations Foundation, a Dutch think tank devoted to developing knowledge for the good of the future, in collaboration with a local poet’s guild. The project evolved out of initial plans to build a stone clock and intends to be a kind of calendar, written in verse.

The first letters of the poem will be carved out and installed on the street early this year. Each week from then on, a new tile with a new character will be added, slowly forming words, sentences, and finally verses. The project’s website writes:

 It takes about three years to publish an average sentence, and every year the poem grows by about 5 meters [approximately 16 feet]. Along the poem’s ‘future’ route, year marks will be installed to indicate where the poem will arrive decades and centuries from now. Time crawls forward through the street like a snail, living, growing, never stopping. [Trans. Charlotte van den Hout]

The project is non-profit, and relies on funding by private donors: anyone with an interest in participating can sign up to sponsor the carving and placement of a letter. By eliciting public involvement, The Letters of Utrecht hopes to become a “social sculpture,” a collaborative effort to create something that will extend the present into the future. So long as there are donors who contribute, the project will continue to inch its way through the city’s streets. Unpublished parts of the poem will be kept secret, revealed only with the gradual carving of its letters. As time passes, the responsibility of writing new stanzas will be passed on from one generation of poets to the next.

The Letters of Utrecht is a poetic voyage through time, fed by the citizens of today as well as those of future generations, a representation of civilization. None of us will see the completed poem, but we help build and transmit it to the readers who come after us. The poem thus links us to the future, reminding us of the importance of nurturing that future. Its letters form a chain that connects the city of Utrecht to its citizens. The stones are strung together into words, into a poem. [Trans. Charlotte van den Hout]

This poetic calendar will be retro-dated to begin its marking of time on January 1, 2000: the 648 character-bearing tiles that represent the weeks that have passed since then will be carved and installed this year, in time for the project’s official inauguration on June 2, 02012. On that date, a public auction will allocate a sponsor for the 649^th tile, to be ceremoniously placed that day.

The Dutch often talk about “je steentje bijdragen.” Literally translated as “to contribute your stone,” this old saying refers to “doing your part” to contribute to something larger than yourself. The Letters of Utrecht project hopes that we all will do our part, and contribute a stone to this long calendar of poetry.

For more information about the project and sponsoring placement of a letter, please visit the project’s Dutch-language website, www.delettersvanutrecht.nl.

Theories about the construction of Stonehenge, Easter Island’s Moai, or the Egyptian pyramids range from the mundane to the outrageous, so trying to imagine what people thousands of years from now will make of the above diagram – or the 340-ton boulder relocation project it represents – may be a futile exercise. Regardless, it’s a pretty safe bet that Levitated Mass, the artwork by Michael Heizer for which such a strange machine is needed, will be around for a while. Will the journey it’s taking over the next 10 days be shrouded in myth and mystery generations hence? That depends, at least in part, on Twitter’s usefulness to future archaeologists – the rock is documenting its trip via tweet.

Sourced from a quarry about a hundred miles from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it will live out its days, the boulder will travel through four counties and 22 cities. Along the way, it will require roads to be closed, paths to be cleared and street signs and overhead wires to be temporarily removed in order to make way for its massive, custom-built transporter. The LA Times is following the project, as is Unframed, LACMA’s blog.

“Heirlooms: Saving Humanity’s 10,000-year Legacy of Food”

Wednesday February 22, 02012 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco

Jim Richardson’s photography focuses heavily on humanity’s relationship to the natural world. He often travels far and wide to explore distant locations, working for both National Geographic and Traveler Magazine, but he’s also lovingly documented life in his own backyard of rural Kansas.

He’ll be speaking in an upcoming Seminar About Long-term Thinking about the biodiversity created by human agriculture. Though industrial monoculture threatens this rich legacy, humans have spent considerable time and effort over the last 10,000 years breeding and cross-breeding plants and animals of every color, stripe and shape. These heirlooms will require their own conservation efforts and documenting them photographically is a task Jim Richardson is highly qualified for.

In an interview for The Comment Factory, he discussed the proliferation of digital photography and the ways it has lowered many photographic boundaries. He reminds us, though, that, “Technology alone is never enough. Meaning comes from people. Technology without meaning is just a waste.”

For more on what makes good photography and how to produce it, he offers Notes and Tips from the field on some photos he’s taken for National Geographic over the years. A recent feature on light pollution called Our Vanishing Night, is full of stunning urban, rural and aerial shots by Richardson that explore our relationship with the night sky.

While on the topic of preserving agricultural diversity, some Long Now followers might be thinking of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a seedbank on an archipelago near the North Pole. (Long Now Executive Director Alexander Rose visited the site in 02011.) Indeed, it’s been on Richardson’s radar as well: he traveled to Svalbard in 02010 and documented some run-ins with the local ‘wildlife’ on his blog.

We’re looking forward to seeing Jim Richardson’s artwork and hearing stories of his travels for this lecture and we hope you’ll join us. The talk is on Wednesday February 22nd at the Cowell Theater. You can reserve tickets, get directions and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page.

Subscribe to the Seminars About Long-term Thinking podcast for more thought-provoking programs.