Long Clock

Here’s a good, if breathless, feature in Discover magazine on the Long Now Foundation’s Clock of the Long Now:

Sometimes, when things get sufficiently weird, subtlety no longer works, so i’ll be blunt: The gleaming device I am staring at in the corner of a machine shop in San Rafael, California, is the most audacious machine ever built. It is a clock, but it is designed to do something no clock has ever been conceived to do—run with perfect accuracy for 10,000 years.

More on the Long Now Foundation:

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996 to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide [a] counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

The term was coined by one of our founding board members, Brian Eno. When Brian first moved to New York City and found that in New York here and now meant this room and this five minutes, as opposed to the larger here and longer now that he was used to in England. We have since adopted the term as the title of our foundation as we are trying to stretch out what people consider as now.

I’ve been reading bits and bobs about the Foundation, and Eno’s involvement with them in particular, for years, without ever bothering to look more closely at their ideas. Fascinating stuff.

Update: without realising it, I chose a rather apt topic for this, the 1,000th post at Submit Response, almost coinciding with the site’s 4th Birthday on October 10th (which I forgot all about).