THE LONG NOW

An Exhibition Of Stretched Time

Curated David Michalek with Danny Hillis

October 5 2017 - December 16 2017

The Long Now was commissioned by David Edward for an exhibition and series of public discussions at Le Laboratoire / Cambridge. Centered around the theme of Stretched Time, it would feature ephemera from Danny Hillis’ so-called “Clock Of The Long Now” alongside several of my own works including “Figure Studies.”

The 10,000 Year Clock (or Clock of the Long Now) was conceived by Hillis in 1986 as a way to encourage people to think about humanity’s distant future. Hours away from any airport and deep in the heart of the Sierra Diablo mountains along the Texas-Mexico border, the 500-foot-tall clock is taking shape. In an era when atomic clocks can tick billions of times a second, the colossal timepiece will tick once a year — for the next 10,000 years. After spending a decade designing the clock, Hillis and the San Francisco-based Long Now Foundation he co-founded are building and installing it within a mountain owned by Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, who has invested $42 million in the project. At the project's groundbreaking, Bezos tweeted a time-lapse video showing construction of the clock, calling it “a symbol for long-term thinking.”

A century hand will advance once every 100 years, and a cuckoo will emerge once every 1,000 years, according to a blog post by Bezos. The mechanism will also contain 10 bells and a so-called “melody generator,” created by rock musician Brian Eno, that is designed to produce a unique pattern of chimes each time the bells sound. The clock impels us to wonder how we will live as far in the future as we are from the beginnings of cities, far beyond the spans it will take to solve all the problems that occupy our thoughts now. If the clock can be built, it may inspire the imaginations of billions of people.

The clock comes at a time as we humans have become so intertwined with what we have created that we are no longer separate from it. We have, as Hillis writes, ““outgrown the distinction between the natural and the artificial. We are what we make. We are our thoughts, whether they are created by our neurons, by our electronically augmented minds, by our technologically mediated social interactions, or by our machines themselves. We are our bodies, whether they are born in womb or test tube, our genes inherited or designed, organs augmented, repaired, transplanted, or manufactured. Our prosthetic enhancements are as simple as contact lenses and tattoos and as complex as robotic limbs and search engines. They are both functional and aesthetic. We are our perceptions, whether they are through our eyes and ears or our sensory-fused hyper-spectral sensors, processed as much by computers as by our own cortex. We are our institutions, cooperating super-organisms, entangled amalgams of people and machines with super-human intelligence, processing, sensing, deciding, acting. Our home planet is inhabited by both engineered organisms and evolved machines. Our very atmosphere is the emergent creation of forests, farms and factories. Our networks of commerce, power and communications are becoming as richly interconnected as ecologies and nervous systems. Empowered by the tools of the Enlightenment, connected by networked flows of freight and fuel and finance, by information and ideas, we are becoming something new. We are at the dawn of the Age of Entanglement.”

As issues and questions such as this were discussed in the context of a forum discussion, the large, slow-moving figures from Figure Studies were projected on the walls around the room’s perimeter.  Elements of the clock machined in metal and ceramic were on display as sculptural objects alongside projected videos of live feeds of both the interior and exterior of the Sierra Diablo mountain that contains the clock.

Exhibition design assistant: Daniel Prosky

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Danny Hillis is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, who pioneered parallel computers and their use in artificial intelligence. He founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a parallel supercomputer manufacturer, and subsequently was Vice President of Research and Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering.Hillis was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for advances in parallel computers, parallel software, and parallel storage. 

More recently, Hillis co-founded Applied Minds, and Applied Invention, an interdisciplinary group of engineers, scientists, and artists. He is a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab. As a graduate student at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Hillis designed tendon-controlled robot arms and a touch-sensitive robot "skin".

During his college years, Hillis was part of the team that built a computer composed entirely of Tinkertoys, currently at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. At MIT, Hillis began to study Artificial Intelligence under Marvin Minsky. In 1981, he proposed building a massively parallel computer for Artificial Intelligence, consisting of a million processors, each similar to a modern Graphics Processing Unit. This work culminated in the design of a massively parallel computer with 64,000 processors. He named it the Connection Machine, and it became the topic of his PhD, for which he received the 1985 Association for Computing Machinery Doctoral Dissertation award. Hillis earned his doctorate as a Hertz Foundation Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon and Gerald Sussman, receiving his PhD in 1988. He later served as an adjunct professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he wrote The Pattern on the Stone.

In 1986, Hillis expressed alarm that society had what he called a "mental barrier" of looking at the year 2000 as the limit of the future. He proposed a project to build a mechanical clock that would last 10,000 years. This project became the initial project of The Long Now Foundation, which he co-founded with Stewart Brand and where he serves as co-chairman. A prototype of the Clock of the Long Now is on display at the London Science Museum. A full-scale mechanical clock is being installed at a site inside a mountain in western Texas.

David Edwards is a scientist, inventor and writer. The founder and inventor of FEND, 2020 Time Magazine Best Invention of the Year, a new daily rite for cleansing the lungs, David's inventions and startups have led to FDA-approved products on the market such as Inbrijia (inhaled L Dopa for Parkinson’s). David was Professor of the Practice of Bioengineering at Harvard University in the School of Engineering & Applied Sciences from 2001 to 2019, and transitioned to Associate at the start of the pandemic to help pioneer the science and global clinical trial program of airway hydration. At Harvard, David’s innovation learning programs have helped pioneer new ways of thinking about the translation of high-impact ideas as captured in his most recent book Creating Things That Matter (Holt 2018), Nautilus Book Award winner in 2018 in the category of creativity. David has received many international honors and awards, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering in the USA and in France, a member of the National Institute of Inventors, and a Chevalier of the Arts & Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. He is the founder of multiple startups, such as Foodberry, and author of books ranging from applied mathematics to fiction and nonfiction. Since David’s first book, he has been exploring ways to create environments that promote idea generation and exchange outside the constraints of commercial markets. These cultural environments have ranged from art and design centers, like Le Laboratoire in Paris, to unusual restaurants, like his most recent Senses. New ways of thinking and behaving are critical to addressing the large challenges of tomorrow — we need places where we can explore where news ways of thinking and behaving lead us.