Nice animated time line of human migration sent to me by Paul Saffo (via Jim Warren). The coolest thing I learned was the very exciting day about 80,000 years ago when a massive volcanic eruption caused a 6 year darkening of the skies!
Artist collaborative plan b makes location-specific works and performances exploring the dynamics of narrative and time. It is composed of artist partners Daniel Rogers and Sophia 
New; Daniel has been carrying GPS trackers with him everywhere since 2003, and Sophia since 2007. They visualize GPS data by translating time-stamped coordinates into lines, and creating time-lapse animations superimposed on maps of their location. These animated visualizations allow Dan and Sophia to discover patterns in the way they move through space and time. Their animation for Berlin, of which the image left is a screenshot, reveals dense straight cords and right angles, representing routes driven daily, and light meandering squiggles, representing walks with their toddler who stops to examine each flower, dog, etc. If Dan and Sophia continued gathering data, they would see the squiggly lines became straighter and darker as their daughter grew up. Essentially, they would see their lives, as manifested in their movement patterns, changing through time.
Closer to home is Cabspotting, a project tracing San Francisco’s GPS-outfitted taxi cabs as they travel throughout the Bay Area. The image right is a screenshot of an time-lapse animation of cabs traveling through the Presidio area between 6:00am-10:00am on January 26, 02006. As with plan b, Cabspotting’s time-lapse animations of taxi cab travel represent economic, social, and cultural trends that would be otherwise invisible. And again, if animations were strung together into a time-lapse animation of time-lapse animations, it would reveal these trends changing through time.
I just saw this press release from the Dia Center for the Arts that the site of the Spiral Jetty (Smithson’s 1970 seminal land art piece on the Great Salt Lake in UT) is being threatened by oil drilling interests. If you would like to voice your opinion on it before the deadline on Feb 13th there is contact information and even sample letters in the press release.
Since we are hoping to build a monument of cultural significance, it was great to come across this wonderful collection of blueprints and process photos from the building of the Eiffel Tower in the 01880s. What is particularly inspiring is that they built it before widespread use of electricity, the telephone, and the automobile, making the technology used to build it little better than that of the ancient wonders (excepting steel of course).
Can art by accident be bred
And if it were would art be dead?
There is a classic thought experiment made famous by French mathematician Émile Borel, the “infinite monkey theorem“, which states — and I paraphrase — that with enough monkeys pounding away for enough time at enough keyboards (and sustained, presumably, by a large enough supply of bananas and Mountain Dew) that one would would eventually happen to produce the works of Shakespeare.
Clearly there’s a lot of redundancy built into this formula — it’s not a recipe for great art, on the whole, but it is an interesting way to crack open one’s head to accommodate infinity.
Against this backdrop comes veteran Guardian (UK) technology columnist Victor Keegan with a website called Shakespeare’s Monkey which spouts random text in the eventual hope of matching the Shakespearean couplet above.
It’s a billion year project, according to Keegan, and so (click “about”) he suggests:
If it doesn’t [happen] in your life time, pass it on to your children.
If you feel we have set the computer too difficult a task, consider what Shakespeares monkeys are thinking as they try to write Hamlet.
It’s a great gimmick, but might benefit from the addition of a few statistics, such as the rate of random line generation, the running time and total number of trials to date, etc.
In any case, Long Now regulars will be familiar with founding board member Brian Eno’s preoccupation with generative art, described for instance in his SALT presentation with Will Wright, and exemplified by his installation 77 Million Paintings presented in San Francisco last summer.
There seems an interesting comparison to be drawn between the generative art (processes designed to produce unpredictable results, as in 77 Million Paintings) and the probabilistic crapshoot involved in attempting to chance upon a particular configuration which coincides with an existing work of art. The former’s algorithm is crafted to produce endless novelty, the latter to replicate a known result. The former is complex enough to come up with a delightful string of non-trivial surprises, the latter streams out nonsense almost all of the time.
Shakespeare’s Monkey poses — and performs — an interesting two-part question: “Can art by accident be bred / And if it were would art be dead?”
It seems to me that the answer to the first part is a qualified yes. In the hands of an aesthetically as well as technically gifted creator, the conditions for producing art (of varying specific characteristics and qualities, to be sure) can be set in motion. Why a qualified yes? Because, to me, there’s a tension between breeding and accident. Breeding is a form of design — it uses accident in a very deliberate way. So, if you’re designing the breeding process, what’s bred thereby isn’t really accidental.
Now, the second part; does this kill art? I’d say of course it doesn’t. Even where there’s more accident built into the setup (a “dumb” algorithm cycling randomly through letters of the alphabet barely counts as “breeding”) it is recognition of a particular result, against human criteria, that makes it art. The art is revealed as being where it always begins and ends: in the eye of the beholder.
While we wait a few more million years for Shakespeare’s Monkey to hit the right letters, truly generative art (new techniques of cultural breeding) is evolving in leaps and bounds. Eno in 01995:
What people are going to be selling more of in the future is not pieces of music, but systems by which people can customize listening experiences for themselves. Change some of the parameters and see what you get. So, in that sense, musicians would be offering unfinished pieces of music - pieces of raw material, but highly evolved raw material, that has a strong flavor to it already. I can also feel something evolving on the cusp between “music,” “game,” and “demonstration” - I imagine a musical experience equivalent to watching John Conway’s computer game of Life or playing SimEarth, for example, in which you are at once thrilled by the patterns and the knowledge of how they are made and the metaphorical resonances of such a system. Such an experience falls in a nice new place - between art and science and playing. This is where I expect artists to be working more and more in the future.
Above is the first known image ever taken from space and our first image of the really ‘big here’. It was shot from a captured German V2 rocket launched after WWII from White Sands missile range. You can find more about the effort in this excellent article in Air & Space magazine (also a link to this really amazing panorama). While it feels like space imagery is something fairly new because of new tools like Google Earth, this hauntingly grainy black and white image taken over 60 years ago reminds me that the intelligence community has been seeing and using this data for a long time. Also worth noting is that while we have this first image, it is my understanding that NASA is missing a large amounts of the early satellite data due to digital data loss. This is a good case where a real film camera has helped preserve the data.
Ori Gersht :: Time After Time: Blow Up No. 12 (02007) :: Image at Mummery+Schnelle
Featured in the September/October edition of Art on Paper magazine, the work of Israel-born, London-based photographer Ori Gersht. His series “Time After Time” (02007) features floral still lifes in the process of exploding, with a surreal and vivid beauty. The frozen violence of the images has a mesmerizing, tranquil feel about it.
These decidedly short nows, according to a quote from Gersht in the article, capture “that moment of suspension, when everything is about to disintegrate, about to fly apart, but is still together. It’s the ultimate present.”
What a powerful metaphor for the darker view of our Long Now — the slowly unfolding ecological and social crises of the age…
Ori Gersht :: Time After Time: Blow Up No. 3 (02007) :: Image at Mummery+Schnelle
This excellent Toles cartoon from the October 14th Washington Post was sent in by Paul Saffo.
I came across this wonderful blog of historical photos recently. The photo above was taken in 1858 of the temple at Karnak. It is interesting to look up modern photos on Flickr of these same things. For instance the columns in the above photos seem to have all been excavated in the last 150 years and now you can see how tall they really are.
Paolo Savagione (lead engineer on our Clock Project) sent in this nifty video of a 1000 year forestry-clock idea in France. We have talked about ideas like this for the 10,000 Year Clock, but this is the first simulation of such an idea I have seen. I think however that there might be more successful ways to use this idea that would be as interesting in the moment as they would be in time lapse.
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