10,000 Years of star motion Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

There is an interesting bit of astronomy published over at PhysOrg.com sent to me by way of Danny Hillis and Tom Shannon.  Apparently astronomers focused Hubble on a certain region of Globular Cluster Omega Cantauri several times over 4 years.  They were then able to calculate how each of those stars will move in the next 10,000 years.  You can see a video of this after the jump on their site here.  It reminds me of our recent blog piece on how the constellations will change over the next 50,000 years.  All of this is of interest to us on the Clock project as one of the main references we use is an image of the night sky for one of our slowest moving dials.  We have to choose stars that do not move very much over the next 10,000 years to use as a good reference in the 26,000 year precessional cycle.

Photo by Jessie Levandov

Opening: Global Lives Project Installation
at The Long Now Museum & Store

Wednesday November 10
6:00 – 8:00 pm

We’ll be celebrating the opening of a Global Lives Project installation at the Long Now Foundation Museum & Store on the evening of November 10th. Please join us for drinks, snacks and some words from Global Lives Project Founder and Executive Director, David Evan Harris. Global Lives Project filmmakers Ya-Hsuan Huang and Jason J. Price will also be in attendance to answer questions.

The Global Lives Project is a collaboratively-built library of human experience gathered from an orphanage in Kazakstan, a corner store in China, a street car in San Francisco and many other locations foreign and familiar. It takes shape online and as a video installation.

Framed by the arc of the day and conveyed through the intimacy of video, we have slowly and faithfully captured 24 continuous hours in the lives of 10 people from around the world. They are screened here in their own right, but also in relation to one another.

There is no narrative other than that which is found in the composition of everyday life, no overt interpretations other than that which you may bring to it.

By extending the long take to a certain extreme and infusing it with the spirit of cinema verité, we invite audiences to confer close attention onto other worlds, and simultaneously reflect upon their own.  The force and depth of human difference and similarity are revealed in this process. Gaps which mark cultural divides feel, at once, both wider and narrower.  This sense – that we, as humans, are both knowable and unknowable, fundamentally different as well as the same – opens a space for dialogue.

-Artist’s Statement 2010

Here’s a great comic strip by Tom Gauld:

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.)

“Long Shorts” – short films that exemplify long-term thinking.  Please submit yours in the comments section…

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