LEVITATED MASS AND THE CLOCK OF THE LONG NOW
"Levitated Mass," 2012
Artist: Michael Heizer
Location: Los Angeles County Museum of Art
"Clock of the Long Now" or the "10,000 Year Clock," 1999-current
Chief Designer: Danny Hillis, The Long Now Foundation.
Location: The first prototype was completed in 1999, while the site for the giant clock is under construction in the Sierra Diablo mountains of far west Texas.
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A rock and a clock.
The giant rock sits above a void at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, while the giant clock is being buried in a cavern in the desert mountains of Texas. The rock rests in space and time, while the clock ticks once per year for 10,000 years. The rock is called "Levitated Mass" and the clock is called the "Clock of the Long Now" or the "10,000 Year Clock."
What is the connection and what do these works of art and technology have to do with human destiny? Much more than you might think. The rock and clock point toward some of the most profound conditions facing humanity — the potential for global enlightenment in the embrace of our place on earth and in the cosmos, or the continued denial of these facts, which produces war, ignorance, exploitation, ecological destruction, and so on.
Levitated Mass, 2012. Photo by Barry Vacker, 2014. Click on photo for more information.
Levitated Mass. Photo by Barry Vacker, 2014.
Click on image to learn more about the 10,000 Year Clock.
FAST FORWARD, REWIND, PAUSE
Our sciences and technologies are accelerating into the new millennium, generating vast new knowledge with the potential to:
• save the ecosystems and environment on our planet.
• provide a great intellectual enlightenment for our species.
• understand our true place in the cosmos and what it means.
Meanwhile, in a reaction toward such acceleration, most of our cultural ideologies have yet to enter the millennium. In fact, some are in a clear reversal, retreating back in time because they fear the future. So science and technology are accelerating as if knowledge has its thumb on the fast forward button, some ideologies have their thumb on the rewind or reverse button — such as creationism, fundamentalism, and anti-science, anti-civilization and anti-technology movements. As for Levitated Mass and the 10,000 Year Clock, they have hit the pause button, in hopes that we can assimilate and embrace the knowledge of the exploding sciences and technologies.
As I write this in 2013, science and technologies are accelerating into a millennium which is still very young, having completed only 1.2% of the next thousand years. Media and information technologies are accelerating the present moment, thrusting us into a 24/7 feedback loop of clicks and links, emails and text messages, uploads and downloads, replies and comments, tweets and updates, photo taking and file sharing, and videos and podcasts. Somewhere amidst this onslaught we are supposed to think, work, relax, travel, exercise, make love, and generally try to be happy (not necessarily in that order).
Meanwhile, the discoveries of science and cosmology are also accelerating, revealing a universe of deep space and deep time, dark energy and dark matter, billions of galaxies amidst vast voids and billions of planets amidst the Milky Way, plus supernovas, black holes, and a variety of star systems. In fact, the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, with vast voids and dark energy pushing the galaxies away from each other. As if powered by a permanent fast forward button, the empty space of the universe is expanding at velocities that exceed one billion miles per hour.
All of these discoveries (among many) beg for contemplation and consideration of what they mean for humans on Spaceship Earth. A global enlightenment is possible. Yes, global enlightenment is possible, if humans are willing to put forth the effort and that means the courage to discard the baggage of outmoded ideologies and worldviews. One major hurdle is finding the time for such an endeavor, the time to research and reflect while holding down jobs, raising families, and enjoying some pleasure and happiness in life. The intellectual sources are there — located all over the internet in books, articles, essays, videos, and documentaries, plus at many websites. But, the time needed for such discovery is exactly what is challenged by the fast forward of text and images pouring from our screens via iPhones, Facebook, YouTube, hundreds of cable channels and billions of websites, most of which are geared to entertainment, hysteria, celebrity gossip, anti-intellectualism, and the hyper-narcissism of consumer society and social media.
But, is a rewind and reversal the solution? With their thumbs on the pause button, Levitated Mass and the 10,000 Year Clock are asking us to reflect upon the trajectories of the modern world.
THE SPEEDS OF EARTH, HUMANS, AND INFORMATION
The rock and the clock seek to arrest our consciousness, inspiring us disengage from the total spectacle and pure speed wrought by the modern world. Not surprisingly, our scientific knowledge of speed is accelerating.
Consider the speed of the Earth:
• it rotates on its axis at 1037 miles per hour.
• it revolves around the sun at just over 1000 miles per minute, or 67,000 miles per hour.
• our solar system including Earth, orbit the center of the Milky Way at 492,000 miles per hour.
• the Milky Way moves through the cosmos at 600,000 miles per hour.
These speeds are truly mind-boggling, especially in comparison to the speeds for humans.
The accelerating speeds humans move:
• we walk at 1-2 miles per hour.
• our best marathoners run at 12-15 miles per hour.
• in a car, we exceed 100 miles per hour.
• in a jetliner, we exceed 600 miles per hour.
• powered by the Saturn 5 rocket, the Apollo astronauts exceeded 18,000 miles per hour.
• aided by the gravity of the outer planets, the Voyager spacecrafts are traveling at 60,000 miles per hour and have left the solar system.
But, the Voyagers are sending information back at the speed light, which is 186,000 miles per second or about 6 trillion miles per year.
The speeds for communication and information:
• oral communication travels at the speed of sound, which is about 750 miles per hour; but sound cannot travel great distances without amplification or electronic transmission.
• communication via print media on paper (books, newspapers, magazines, etc.) could only travel as fast as humans could transport it, via walking, wagons, ships, trucks, trains, planes, or the internet.
• electronic communication and information travel at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second.
Since our entire culture is being re-ordered and re-structured via electronic media technologies, the pace of life has accelerated on Earth, precisely because the speed of human culture mirrors the speed of communication and technology.
So, here we are, hurtling through a vast cosmos while encircling our ancient planet with satellites and media technologies that enable us to communicate at the speed of light in the frenzy of a 24/7 nonstop civilization, populated by people who mostly act as if they are the center of the universe as they wage wars, devour resources, pollute the planet, all while chatting on their phones and uploading pictures of themselves.
THE MODERN PROJECT
Modernity and the modern project represented a complete break from the past, abandoning the slow premodern and medieval worlds for the fast worlds of modernity and its proliferating machines. Born of science, enlightenment philosophy, and technology (machines such as printing press, factories, engines, and energy such as electricity and fossil fuels), the modern world sought to move the masses from:
• ignorance to enlightenment
• scarcity to abundance
• poverty to wealth
• agrarian society to industrial society
• exploitation to equality
• oppression to opportunity
• serfdom to freedom
• aristocracy and theocracy to democracy
• permanent war to perpetual peace.
Obviously, these transformations provided great benefits for humanity, but also yielded many unintended and unexpected effects over time.[1] The general feeling toward escaping the past was “the sooner the better,” as progress and the modern future could not get here fast enough. Science, freedom, and industrial technology would provide the accelerators.
Galileo may have shown we were not the center of the universe, but modern industrial technology (especially electric light) allowed us to pretend we were the center of the cosmos in our homes and metropolises. By the early twentieth century, it was clear that industrial technologies were radically transforming human civilization and accelerating the pace of life, especially in the metropolises. The Italian “Futurists” championed an art and cultural aesthetic of speed, seeing “beauty” in the gleaming metropolises of steel, glass, and machines moving ever faster. Cities, nations, and peoples were urged to be “on the move” in the embrace of change, progress, and the better world coming in the future.
However imperfectly, the world celebrated by the Futurists was largely built — skyscraper metropolises, populated by the mobile masses in their cars, trains, and planes. Modern humans became beholden to the bounty of mass produced goods, elegantly packaged in the malls before being purchased to fill the voids in homes in high rises or suburbia, where TV screens glowed in the electronic spectacle. Unfortunately, this world transformation generated effects that were unintended and unexpected, while outmoded ideologies generated other effects that were highly predictable. For most people, the future became scary, especially the collective future.
TWO SHOCKS
In 1970, Alvin Toffler identified the inability (or unwillingness) of most people to cognitively and philosophically adapt to the accelerating changes wrought by technologies and scientific discoveries. Toffler labeled this condition as "future shock," which is the intellectual inability to handle "the premature arrival of the future." Decades later, these conditions remain acute, as illustrated by the proliferation of tribalism and loss of secular grand narratives to unite peoples on Earth, now being contested by creationism, fundamentalism, and anti-intellectualism, especially in America. America used to be home to the cosmic future in outer space and Houston, with Mission Control and NASA, but now America’s only grand vision of the future (such that it has one) is in cyberspace and Silicon Valley, which have merged with the White House’s and Pentagon’s grand visions of war and corporate-theological empire.
In 2013, Douglas Rushkoff updated Toffler's basic insight and adapted it to current times, labeling this new condition as "present shock," or the inability to handle the nonstop now of mediated culture. For Rushkoff, present shock represents the entropy of unifying grand narratives for our culture — a "digi-phrenic" culture of schizo screen gazers, busily crafting their multiple online identities, locked into now and disconnected from the past and future, unable to concentrate long enough to project a collective tomorrow that is not apocalyptic.
Forget the vast universe, for Facebook says we are the center of space and time; forget the ancient ecosystems of Earth, for Madison Avenue says we are the consumer society; forget provacy and civil liberties, for the White House says we are waging the terror war. Forget the past and future, for there is only now.
Enter the rock and the clock, both which counter future shock and present shock.
LEVITATED MASS
Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass is one of the most thought-provoking works of art in the new millennium. Why? Because it taps into the past and present in a profound way, while posing a meditative question for our future and human destiny.
Levitated Mass consists of three distinct parts cleverly arranged to create an aesthetic totality — a 340-ton granite boulder resting astride a 456-foot-long slot in the ground, a slot that gradually descends to fifteen feet beneath the boulder to create the third part of the artwork, the void of negative space or nothingness. The boulder is rough and unpolished, while the slot is lined with concrete. The slot stretches across the grounds outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
The artwork has generated much discussion, pro and con, even generating an alternative title: "Rock Star." As the giant boulder was slowly hauled through the streets of Los Angeles, crowds gathered to witness the event and neighborhood parties coincided with the passing of the Rock Star. Some people waved American flags, some played music, and some rushed to touch the canvas surrounding the boulder, as if they were touching something special and magical. The boulder's journey was chronicled in this short video at the LACMA website (once you are at the web site, scroll down to see video).
Despite the beauty in the contrast between the unpolished granite and poured concrete slot, there seems to be a flaw in the design — beneath the boulder inside the slot are two steel supports, which undermine the feel of levitation or the contrast of lightness and mass. Why not embed the supports in the concrete? Perhaps Heizer wanted to clearly contrast the boulder against both steel and concrete? Nevertheless, the grand gesture and philosophical ambitions of Levitated Mass make it worthy of philosophical discussion.
WHAT IS THE SILENT ROCK SAYING?
Megalith Meets Modernity
At the most direct level, Levitated Mass connects art history with the new millennium — it combines the ancient with the contemporary, the megalith with the modern, the natural with the technological. The boulder harkens to the untouched natural world, the lost world for humans in our sprawling metropolises, completely electrified and mechanized. Situated astride the void, the boulder also harkens to the forces of nature acting over the eons to produce the stone, a microcosm of the geological formation of Spaceship Earth floating in the cosmic void. The granite stone will last eons, too, perhaps becoming an ancient urban ruin if Los Angeles ever runs out of energy or fresh water. In fact, the artwork will become more beautiful as it ages, like most megalithic art.
Permanence and Deep Time
Levitated Mass is a like a giant granite pause button, a meteor timepiece dropped in the worlds of Hollywood and Disneyland. That the giant stone speaks of permanence and deep time only provides a more stark contrast to our current culture, wedded to worshipping the temporary and instant, the worlds of media, movies, theme parks, Twitter, Facebook, and Present Shock. Levitated Mass should need no status update, except in a few decades to check the concrete and steel supports, which should fare reasonably well in the Los Angeles climate. It is quite possible Levitated Mass will outlive the more famous artworks of Los Angeles and Hollywood — the movies and the levitated images playing on Imax screens around the world. Let's hope the stone does not get the graffiti treatment from some local tribe or gets branded with some corporate name from a big donor. We can see it happening: The Dreamworks Levitated Mass.
Lost Solitude
Perhaps Levitated Mass also suggests a lost solitude — the time and space of aloneness that has been erased in our 24/7 media environments, where surveillance is obliterating solitude and privacy. And soon the drones will be buzzing and hovering above. Standing alone, quiet and stoic, the stone seems to be a sentinel above the void, suggesting we spend time alone (at least in our consciousness) to contemplate the artwork and its many meanings.
Earth Art and Earthrise
Double Negative, 1969Levitated Mass also draws from Heizer's long career of working in what is variously called Land Art, Environmental Art, or Earth Art, an artistic movement born in the 1960s through the work of pioneers such as Heizer, Nancy Holt, and Robert Smithson. Though Heizer has spent decades working on the site, City, perhaps his most famous previous artwork was Double Negative, the 1500-foot-long trench created in the desert mesa of Utah in 1969. Obviously, this trench in the desert inspired the slot in Levitated Mass. Heizer's largest works qualify as "Earth Art" because of their scale and universality, posing questions for the human species, not any special tribe or demographic group. Among many things, Earth Art is an attempt to return nature to culture, or at least make humans more cognizant of the natural world they left behind in migrating to the metropolises.
In a very real sense, Earth Art was also a response to the space age. Earth Art seemed to be a way to remain grounded aesthetically and philosophically, with humanity accelerating beyond the gravity of Earth as the planet itself hurtled through the cosmos. Earth Art was a way to step back and contemplate our role on the planet and, by extension, in the cosmos.
The modified Earthrise.When I first saw a photograph of Levitated Mass, my mind immediately recalled Earthrise, the iconic photo of Earth “rising” above the moon's surface. The photo was taken on December 24, 1968, by William Anders, one of the Apollo 8 astronauts. The mission of Apollo 8 was to orbit the moon ten times, conduct a few telecasts, and return safely to Earth. But, Apollo 8 provided much more: Earthrise was the first time humans saw their actual existential place in the universe, inhabitants of a blue and white planet floating in the darkness of the vast voids of the cosmos. The photograph did provide a powerful confirmation of the Copernican Revolution, while also inspiring Buckminster Fuller's “Spaceship Earth” (we are all passengers and crew on Earth) and James Lovelock's “Gaia Hypothesis” (the biosphere and ecosystems are one massive system of systems that sustain life on Earth).
Much like Heizer's Double Negative in 1969, Earthrise also captured "negative space" to pose a profound philosophical challenge to the human species and its artists and thinkers. So far, the vast majority of humankind has not risen to the task, remaining in denial for decades. In fact, the philosophical challenge was denied and evaded almost as soon as the Earthrise image was captured, when the Apollo 8 astronauts read from Genesis during a global telecast to give the scientific triumph meaning for the masses, represented by the almost one billion viewers. That moment may well have signaled the collapse of the enlightenment and modern project, at the very pinnacle of human achievement. This was future shock from the moon.
Whereas Earth Art sought to anchor human consciousness on Earth and in the cosmos, the Apollo 8 Genesis reading sought to liberate human consciousness from Earth and the cosmos, the very things present right before two billion human eyes. Perhaps it was the terror of negative space that generated the cosmic vertigo, the voids that required new meanings, not recycled creation myths. We know Earthrise means that Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and thousands of contemporary astronomers are correct: Earth is not the center of the universe. Earthrise also implies a universal message: humans are one species, sharing a planet with millions of other species, and we should end war and take care of the planet because it is our only home for the foreseeable future. Properly understood, Earthrise situates humans on their planet in the cosmos, not unlike the best of Earth Art.
Negative Space and Nothingness
As with Earthrise, the negative space in Double Negative and Levitated Mass force the viewer to confront the voids, to fill the nothingnesses with meaning. In this sense, Heizer is an aesthetic existentialist, for his giant works force us to confront the nothingnesses that are the ground for human reason, meaning, and freedom. Without the nothingnesses in the material world and in human consciousness, there would be no room for human action or human thought.
As Jean-Paul Sartre explained in Being and Nothingness, humans must confront and overcome three voids, three nothingnesses — in the material world, in human consciousness, and in the future. We evolved on planet Earth without food and shelter, the voids in the material world that we fill with agrarian and industrial civilization. We also have a lack of knowledge and information about the world, the voids in consciousness that we will with language, art, books, computers, the internet, and the information society. It is the third nothingness that is most terrifying, the void of the future. As Sartre poetically explained, the present is always retreating into the past, so we must project ourselves into the future, a mix of certainty and uncertainty. There is no exit from tomorrow. That's why humans crave predictable futures and secure destinies, even eternal destinies (among theists or geneticists seeking to end human aging).
At the deepest level, Levitated Mass and Earthrise are about human destiny, on Earth and in the cosmos.
The original Earthrise.The Apollo 8 telecast and Earthrise triggered an existential crisis and cosmic vertigo, as illustrated by the Genesis reading and the following strange event. The original Earthrise image showed Earth to the left of the moon, yet NASA decided to flip the image 90 degrees to the right to give the illusion that Earth was rising above the horizon of the moon. Earth rising above the moon was apparently more existentially comforting, unlike Earth floating beside the moon, with nothing below it amidst the void, an image too vertiginous for ancient ideologies back on Earth.
Heizer's Levitated Mass achieves a similar effect, though with the support of steel and concrete in place of the moon’s surface. The art work forces us to reflect upon the question of just what the hell we are doing on this planet — with ourselves and to other humans, other species, and the natural world. And this question is central to purpose of the Clock of the Long Now.
THE 10,000 YEAR CLOCK
At precisely 12:00:00 am on January 1, 2000, the Clock of the Long Now ticked for the first time. Strangely, this new clock did not tick again until the same time the next year. In fact, this clock is most unusual, for it ticks but once a year, at 12:00:00, on the moment between December 31 and January 1, precisely upon the arrival of each new year. The first prototype of the Clock was completed in 1999. Designed to stand sixty feet tall (and looking like a futuristic grandfather clock), the full-scale timepiece is destined for burial in caverns in the desert mountains of far west Texas and northern Nevada, where it will tick once per year for the next 10,000 years.
The 10,000 Year Clock was featured in 2005 cover story in Discover magazine; it was also the subject of a popular book devoted to explaining the technological and cultural ambitions of the Clock, appropriately titled The Clock of the Long Now.[2] The first prototype of the Clock is now displayed at The Science Museum in London. Designed by Danny Hillis, a famed computer designer and former Disney Imagineer, the Clock will be made of “Bronze Age” materials, including “Monel alloy, Invar alloy, tungsten carbide, metallic glass, and synthetic sapphire.”[3]
The face of the 10,000 Year Clock has analog hands that tick once every new year, and a “century hand” that advances once every 100 years. The cuckoo or chime will sound once at the turn of each millennium, for the next ten millennia. The ten millennia symbolize the time frame from the year 2000, back to the first technologies developed around ten thousand years ago. While only a blip in terms of evolutionary and cosmic time, the past 10,000 years spans the history of human technology, from the earliest plow to the latest laptop — the time span of technology in a single clock.
Designed to be much larger than the prototype, the sixty-foot Clock will stand in two places in America — the Sierra Diablo mountains of west Texas and in the Great Basin National Park, on a mountain inhabited by 4000-year-old bristlecone pine trees. The Clock will stand in cavernous chambers, carved into the high desert mountains, locations that will provide safety from the corrosive effects of nature and culture. The 10,000 Year Clock will be secured away from the modern world, a chronographic cave dweller of the future — the slowest computer ever built.
DECELERATING THE FUTURE, FOR A MOMENT?
The 10,000 Year Clock is not the work of Luddites, for it was conceived, designed, and funded by some of the most famous and wealthiest from Silicon Valley. Overseeing the Clock development is the Long Now Foundation which includes: Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems; Mitchell Kapor, founder of Lotus software; Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine; Peter Schwartz is a founder of the Global Business Network; Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalogue and author of several best-selling books on technology and ecology; Esther Dyson, an influential thinker among the digital elite; Brian Eno, the composter and artist who coined the name “Clock of the Long Now.” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has been a supporter for the past decade, as he explains at the site for the 10,000 Year Clock.
Why conceive and construct a clock that ticks but once a year, for 10,000 years? With scientific and technological innovation accelerating every year, the Long Now Foundation concluded that humanity has adopted a very short-range mode of thinking about the future. The explicit aim of the Clock is to decelerate the future, to slow down the arrival of the tomorrow, to create a moment for reflection and contemplation, to inspire more long-term thinking and planning about the destiny of humanity and life on Earth. The 10,000 Year Clock is a chronographic pause button.
In 1969, Stewart Brand placed the Earthrise image on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalogue. According to Brand, the photo reorganized the conception of space on Earth, while the 10,000 Year Clock seeks to reorganize the conception of time on Earth. In an essay the Long Now website, Brand explained:
In a sense what we’re doing with the clock is to do even more for time what the photograph of the Earth did for space. Like understanding of the earthly environment as one whole thing — we're trying to understand a period of time reaching 10,000 years into the past and 10,000 years into the future as one containable thought.
For Brand, the entirety of culture and civilization can be envisioned in a single thought, in a single dimension of space-time, in a static photo from space and a slow clock in the desert. The idea is to effect a "Long Now" to provide the cognitive space and time to reflect upon the bigger picture, namely our role in role in space and time on Earth.
Can the Clock effect the “Long Now” it seeks? After all, technology can now measure time down to the billionth of a second, and the speed of life seems to accelerate every day, amplify every year. But if technology increased the distance between our measurements of time, could it decrease the velocity of life, decelerate the flow of events and information? Literally, no; cognitively, yes.
While clever and poetic, a “Long Now” of time would be impossible to realize in concrete actuality. A single pattern of time imposed like a template on human culture would necessarily eliminate the freedom and singularities needed for positive adaptation, not unlike the effects of the totalizing single plans of dictatorships and rigid bureaucracies. The cosmos and technology provide multiple patterns and multiple speeds for the experience of time, which is necessary to prevent a logjam in our experience of the stream of events we call life.[4]
However, the technological acceleration of “now” creates it own cognitive logjam in the experience of present shock. That’s why there is the “Slow Food” and “Slow Cities” movements to counter fast food and car culture. Future shock and present shock are what the Clock seeks to counter, which is why I think of the Clock more as a work of art and critical theory, though it is surely a major technological achievement.
A “Long Now” as a cognitive space is a powerful idea. The Clock of the Long Now is a beautiful metaphor, like a fractal that relates time to matter, culture to nature, and civilization to evolution. In that sense, the Clock situates us in deep time to provide cognitive space, thus freeing us to contemplate our place in the cosmos and on earth, and what it means for us individually and as a species. After all, art and philosophy have largely failed to meet this intellectual challenge, to find a shared and universal meaning in the cosmological discoveries of contemporary science. What else explains the proliferating creationism and fundamentalism? As Stephen Hawking declared in The Grand Design: “philosophy is dead.” Art and philosophy have simply not provided the secular grand narratives for humanity in the universe as we know it. And Star Trek movies cannot do it alone.
Perhaps the Clock can inspire artists, thinkers, and humans to reflect upon their own personal and shared roles in nature, evolution, culture, and civilization, and then embrace a greater sense of living with nature and the universe. Such solitude and contemplation is crucial for human existence amidst the many rhythms of the chaotic and complex universe. Were the 10,000 Year Clock to achieve more cosmic contemplation by humans amidst the 24/7 spectacle, that indeed would be a major artistic and philosophical triumph.
THE PAUSE BUTTON
Levitated Mass and the 10,000 Year Clock offer no easy answers, no childish myths for the unthinking and uncritical. But they provide the “pause,” the moment for contemplation, the cognitive and cultural singularity that might signal a new consciousness and the possibility for global enlightenment. In sum, here are some of the key effects of the rock and the clock.
Levitated Mass asks us to contemplate:
• the megalithic arts that are universal to the human species.
• the ancient and the contemporary as part of a cultural continuum.
• the untouched and natural world missing from the cultural and technological worlds.
• the personal solitude lost amidst total spectacle and total surveillance.
As with Earthrise, the negative space of Levitated Mass especially asks us to contemplate:
• the sense of permanence of the giant stone in contrast to the impermanence of our personal lives and perhaps our civilization.
• our futures and destinies as we pass through the slot (space and time) and under the stone.
• our place in relation to nature and cosmos, especially when we are standing so the stone is situated against the skies of LA.
The 10,000 Year Clock asks us to contemplate:
• the long-term effects of our civilization and existence on planet Earth.
• ancient time-keeping and contemporary chronography as part of a cultural continuum.
• the sense of deep time lost in the culture of the instant.
• the solitude and contemplation lost in the blur of the 24/7 media spectacle.
• the return of a grand narrative that unites past and future, where history and tomorrow are part of a continuum for the human species.
• the sense of a grand project with universal relevance for our species — just like Apollo, the internet, and climate change.
Together, the artworks unite past and future in the contemplation of deep space and deep time. Their mere existence suggests we can confront the voids to produce a better world and a sane future, with a destiny grounded in art, science, nature, and the cosmos. In that pause lies the possibility and ground for global enlightenment. For these aesthetic and philosophical achievements, we owe much gratitude to Michael Heizer, Danny Hillis, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Long Now Foundation.
ENDNOTES
[1] Amidst all the benefits, the modern world had its unintended and expected effects. For most people:
• Exploitation and oppression never really went away, for these injustices just moved into new forms that exist in capitalism, socialism, and all theisms.
• Abundance and wealth became the super-sized consumer society, along with the destruction of the ecosystems that exist somewhere beyond the electric lights of the metropolis.
• Equality and freedom became the right to shop in a world of consumer choice, to celebrate teams in the sports spectacle, to update your status with party photos.
• Aristocracy became the celebrity system of movie stars, pop stars, athletes, wealthy people, select criminals, those famed for being famous, and any politicians clever or lucky enough to become celebrities.
• Theocracy lurks in the championing of ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and anti-rationalism, illustrated by the proliferation of creationism and the attacks on science, evolution, climate change, global warming, women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, artistic freedom, and so on.
• Democracy became Nielsen ratings, opinion polls, televised debates, reader comments, endless “likes,” and something to do with massive standing armies and 24/7 surveillance.
• Expression became designer jeans, team logos, followed by blogs, tweets, websites, status updates, tattoos, and a carnival of signs and symbols pasted on all forms of clothing and all parts of the body, as reflecting the tribalization of the electronic culture.
• Enlightenment became entertainment in the media spectacle of sports, celebrities, sitcoms, crime shows, and the 24/7 news cycle of fear, hysteria, and happy talk.
• Perpetual peace became the Cold War and then the Terror War.
• And the “beauty of speed” became the ever-accelerating hyper-speed of today.
[2] Brad Lemley, “Time Machine,” Discover 28-35 (November 2005); Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now, New York: Basic Books, 1999).
[3] Brand, The Clock of the Long Now, 63.
[4] Alexander Argyros, A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1991), 261-280.
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