Stewart Brand's Blog, page 12

Michael McElligott, A Staple of San Francisco Art and Culture, Dies at 50

It is with great sadness that we share the news that Michael McElligott, an event producer, thespian, writer, long-time Long Now staff member, and relentless promoter of the San Francisco avant-garde, has died. He was 50 years old.

Michael battled an aggressive form of brain cancer over the past year. He kept his legendary sense of humor throughout his challenging treatment. He died surrounded by family, friends, and his long-time partner, Danielle Engelman, Long Now’s Director of Programs.

Most of the Long Now community knew Michael as the face of the Conversations at The Interval speaking series, which began in 02014 with the opening of Long Now’s Interval bar/cafe. But he did much more than host the talks. For the first five years of the series, each of the talks was painstakingly produced by Michael. This included finding speakers, developing the talk with the speakers, helping curate all the media associated with each talk, and oftentimes hosting the talks. Many of the production ideas explored in this series by Michael became adopted across other Long Now programs, and we are so thankful we got to work with him.

An event producer since his college days, Michael was active in San Francisco’s art and theater scene as a performer and instigator of unusual events for more than 20 years. From 01999 to 02003 Michael hosted and co-produced The Tentacle Sessions, a monthly series spotlighting accomplished individuals in the San Francisco Bay Area scene—including writers, artists, and scientists. He has produced and performed in numerous alternative theater venues over the years including Popcorn Anti-Theater, The EXIT, 21 Grand, Stage Werx, and the late, great Dark Room Theater.

Michael was a long-time blogger (usually under his nom de kunst mikl-em) for publications including celebrated arts magazine Hi Fructose and award-winning internet culture site Laughing Squid. His writing can be found in print in the Hi Fructose Collected Edition books and Tales of The San Francisco Cacophony Society in which he recounted some of his adventures with that noted countercultural group.

Beginning in the late 01990s as an employee at Hot Wired, Michael worked in technology in various marketing, technical and product roles. He worked at both startups and tech giants; helped launch products for both consumers and enterprise; and worked with some of the best designers and programmers in the industry.

Originally from Richmond, Virginia, he co-founded a college radio station and an underground art space before moving to San Francisco. In the Bay Area, he was involved with myriad artistic projects and creative ventures, including helping start the online radio station Radio Valencia.

Michael had been a volunteer and associate of Long Now since 02006; he helped at events and Seminars, wrote for the blog and newsletter, and was a technical advisor. In 02013 he officially joined the staff to help raise funds, run social media, and design and produce the Conversations at The Interval lecture series.

To honor Michael’s role in helping to fundraise for and build The Interval, we have finally completed the design on the donor wall which will be dedicated to him.  It should be completed in the next few weeks and will bear a plaque remembering Michael. You can watch a playlist of all of Michael’s Interval talks here. Below, you can find a compilation of moments from the more than a hundred talks that Michael hosted over the years.

“This moment is really both an end and a beginning. And like the name The Interval, which is a measure of time, and a place out of time, this is that interval.”

Michael McElligott

The Alchemical Brothers: Brian Eno & Roger Eno Interviewed

Long Now co-founder Brian Eno on time, music, and contextuality in a recent interview, rhyming on Gregory Bateson’s definition of information as “a difference that makes a difference”:

If a Martian came to Earth and you played her a late Beethoven String Quartet and then another written by a first-year music student, it is unlikely that she would a) understand what the point of listening to them was at all, and b) be able to distinguish between them.

What this makes clear is that most of the listening experience is constructed in our heads. The ‘beauty’ we hear in a piece of music isn’t something intrinsic and immutable – like, say, the atomic weight of a metal is intrinsic – but is a product of our perception interacting with that group of sounds in a particular historical context. You hear the music in relation to all the other experiences you’ve had of listening to music, not in a vacuum. This piece you are listening to right now is the latest sentence in a lifelong conversation you’ve been having. What you are hearing is the way it differs from, or conforms to, the rest of that experience. The magic is in our alertness to novelty, our attraction to familiarity, and the alchemy between the two.

The idea that music is somehow eternal, outside of our interaction with it, is easily disproven. When I lived for a few months in Bangkok I went to the Chinese Opera, just because it was such a mystery to me. I had no idea what the other people in the audience were getting excited by. Sometimes they’d all leap up from their chairs and cheer and clap at a point that, to me, was effectively identical to every other point in the performance. I didn’t understand the language, and didn’t know what the conversation had been up to that point. There could be no magic other than the cheap thrill of exoticism.

So those poor deluded missionaries who dragged gramophones into darkest Africa because they thought the experience of listening to Bach would somehow ‘civilise the natives’ were wrong in just about every way possible: in thinking that ‘the natives’ were uncivilised, in not recognising that they had their own music, and in assuming that our Western music was culturally detachable and transplantable – that it somehow carried within it the seeds of civilisation. This cultural arrogance has been attached to classical music ever since it lost its primacy as the popular centre of the Western musical universe, as though the soundtrack of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th Century was somehow automatically universal and superior.

People slept on comfy grass beds 200,000 years ago

The oldest beds known to science now date back nearly a quarter of a million years: traces of silicate from woven grasses found in the back of Border Cave (in South Africa, which has a nearly continuous record of occupation dating back to 200,000 BCE).

Ars Technica reports:

Most of the artifacts that survive from more than a few thousand years ago are made of stone and bone; even wooden tools are rare. That means we tend to think of the Paleolithic in terms of hard, sharp stone tools and the bones of butchered animals. Through that lens, life looks very harsh—perhaps even harsher than it really was. Most of the human experience is missing from the archaeological record, including creature comforts like soft, clean beds.

Given recent work on the epidemic of modern orthodontic issues caused in part by sleeping with “bad oral posture” due to too-soft bedding, it seems like the bed may be another frontier for paleo re-thinking of high-tech life. (See also the controversies over barefoot running, prehistoric diets, and countless other forms of atavism emerging from our future-shocked society.) When technological innovation shuffles the “pace layers” of human existence, changing the built environment faster than bodies can adapt, sometimes comfort’s micro-scale horizon undermines the longer, slower beat of health.

Another plus to making beds of grass is their disposability and integration with the rest of ancient life:

Besides being much softer than the cave floor, these ancient beds were probably surprisingly clean. Burning dirty bedding would have helped cut down on problems with bedbugs, lice, and fleas, not to mention unpleasant smells. [Paleoanthropologist Lyn] Wadley and her colleagues suggest that people at Border Cave may even have raked some extra ashes in from nearby hearths ‘to create a clean, odor-controlled base for bedding.’

And charcoal found in the bedding layers includes bits of an aromatic camphor bush; some modern African cultures use another closely related camphor bush in their plant bedding as an insect repellent. The ash may have helped, too; Wadley and her colleagues note that ‘several ethnographies report that ash repels crawling insects, which cannot easily move through the fine powder because it blocks their breathing and biting apparatus and eventually leaves them dehydrated.’

Finding beds as old as Homo sapiens itself revives the (not quite as old) debate about what makes us human. Defining our humanity as “artists” or “ritualists” seems to weave together modern definitions of technology and craft, ceremony and expression, just as early people wove together sedges for a place to sleep. At least, they are the evidence of a much more holistic, integrated way of life — one that found every possible synergy between day and night, cooking and sleeping:

Imagine that you’ve just burned your old, stale bedding and laid down a fresh layer of grass sheaves. They’re still springy and soft, and the ash beneath is still warm. You curl up and breathe in the tingly scent of camphor, reassured that the mosquitoes will let you sleep in peace. Nearby, a hearth fire crackles and pops, and you stretch your feet toward it to warm your toes. You nudge aside a sharp flake of flint from the blade you were making earlier in the day, then drift off to sleep.

A Tribute to Michael McElligott, creator of “Conversations at The Interval”

It is with great sadness that we share the news that our dear friend and colleague Michael McElligott is in hospice care. We want to take this moment to appreciate all that Michael has done for Long Now.

Most of the Long Now community knows Michael as the face of the Conversations at The Interval speaking series, which began in 02014 with the opening of Long Now’s Interval bar/cafe. But he did much more than host the talks. 

Michael had been a volunteer and associate of Long Now since 02006; he helped at events and Seminars, wrote for the blog and newsletter, and was a technical advisor. In 02013 he officially joined the staff to help raise funds for the construction of The Interval, run social media, and design and produce the Conversations at The Interval lecture series.

For the first five years of the series, each of the talks was painstakingly produced by Michael. This included finding speakers, developing the talk with the speakers, helping curate all the media associated with each talk, and oftentimes hosting the talks. Many of the production ideas explored in this series by Michael became adopted across other Long Now programs, and we are so thankful we got to work with him.

You can watch a playlist of all of Michael’s Interval talks here.

Kathryn Cooper’s Wildlife Movement Photography

Amazing wildlife photography by Kathryn Cooper reveals the brushwork of birds and their flocks through sky, hidden by the quickness of the human eye.

“Staple Newk” by Kathryn Cooper.

Ever since Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering photography of animal locomotion in 01877 and 01878 (including the notorious “horse shot by pistol” frames from an era less concerned with animal experiments), the trend has been to unpack our lived experience of movement into serial, successive frames. The movie camera smears one pace layer out across another, lets the eye scrub over one small moment.

“UFO” by Kathryn Cooper.

In contrast, time-lapse and long exposure camerawork implodes the arc of moments, an integral calculus that gathers the entire gesture. Cooper’s flock photography is less the autopsy of high-speed video and more the graceful enzo drawn by a zen master.

Learn More

Watch this clip from Jonathon Keats’ Long Now talk about a camera that takes a century to create a photograph.In 02017, geneticist George Church stored Muybridge’s famous “Sallie Gardner at a Gallop” in living bacteria.

Puzzling artifacts found at Europe’s oldest battlefield

Bronze-Age crime scene forensics: newly discovered artifacts only deepen the mystery of a 3,300-year-old battle. What archaeologists previously thought to be a local skirmish looks more and more like a regional conflict that drew combatants in from hundreds of kilometers away…but why?

Much like the total weirdness of the Ediacaran fauna of 580 million years ago, this oldest Bronze-Age battlefield is the earliest example of its kind in the record…and firsts are always difficult to analyze:

Among the stash are also three bronze cylinders that may have been fittings for bags or boxes designed to hold personal gear—unusual objects that until now have only been discovered hundreds of miles away in southern Germany and eastern France.

‘This was puzzling for us,’ says Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist at the University of Göttingen in Germany who helped launch the excavation at Tollense and co-authored the paper. To Terberger and his team, that lends credence to their theory that the battle wasn’t just a northern affair.

Anthony Harding, an archaeologist and Bronze Age specialist who was not involved with the research: ‘Why would a warrior be going round with a lot of scrap metal?’ he asks. To interpret the cache—which includes distinctly un-warlike metalworking gear—as belonging to warriors is ‘a bit far-fetched to me,’ he says.

How to Be in Time

Photograph: Scott Thrift.

“We already have timepieces that show us how to be on time. These are timepieces that show us how to be in time.”

– Scott Thrift

Slow clocks are growing in popularity, perhaps as a tonic for or revolt against the historical trend of ever-faster timekeeping mechanisms.

Given that bell tower clocks were originally used to keep monastic observances of the sacred hours, it seems appropriate to restore some human agency in timing and give kairos back some of the territory it lost to the minute and second hands so long ago…

Scott Thrift’s three conceptual timepieces measure with only one hand each, counting 24 hour, one-month, and one-year cycles with each revolution. Not quite 10,000 years, but it’s a consumer-grade start.

“Right now we’re living in the long-term effects of short-term thinking. I don’t think it’s possible really for us to commonly think long term if the way that we tell time is with a short-term device that just shows the seconds, minutes, and hours. We’re precluded to seeing things in the short term.”

-Scott Thrift

Scientists Have a Powerful New Tool to Investigate Triassic Dark Ages

The time-honored debate between catastrophists and gradualists (those who believe major Earth changes were due to sudden violent events or happened over long periods of time) has everything to do with the coarse grain of the geological record. When paleontologists only have a series of thousand-year flood deposits to study, it’s almost impossible to say what was really going on at shorter timescales. So many of the great debates of natural history hinge on the resolution at which data can be collected, and boil down to something like, “Was it a meteorite impact that caused this extinction, or the inexorable climate changes caused by continental drift?”

One such gap in our understanding is in the Late Triassic — a geological shadow during which major regime changes in terrestrial fauna took place, setting the stage for The Age of Dinosaurs. But the curtains were closed during that scene change…until, perhaps, now:

By determining the age of the rock core, researchers were able to piece together a continuous, unbroken stretch of Earth’s history from 225 million to 209 million years ago. The timeline offers insight into what has been a geologic dark age and will help scientists investigate abrupt environmental changes from the peak of the Late Triassic and how they affected the plants and animals of the time.

Cool new detective work on geological “tree rings” from the Petrified Forest National Park (where I was lucky enough to do some revolutionary paleontological reconstruction work under Dr. Bill Parker back in 2005).

The Deep Sea

As detailed in the exquisite documentary Proteus, the ocean floor was until very recently a repository for the dreams of humankind — the receptacle for our imagination. But when the H.M.S. Challenger expedition surveyed the world’s deep-sea life and brought it back for cataloging by now-legendary illustrator Ernst Haeckel (who coined the term “ecology”), the hidden benthic universe started coming into view. What we found, and what we continue to discover on the ocean floor, is far stranger than the monsters we’d projected.

This spectacular site by Neal Agarwal brings depth into focus. You’ve surfed the Web; now take a few and dive all the way down to Challenger Deep, scrolling past the animals that live at every depth.

Just as The Long Now situates us in a humbling, Copernican experience of temporality, Deep Sea reminds us of just how thin of a layer surface life exists in. Just as with Stewart Brand’s pace layers, the further down you go, the slower everything unfolds: the cold and dark and pressure slow the evolutionary process, dampening the frequency of interactions between creatures, bestowing space and time for truly weird and wondrous and as-yet-uncategorized life.

Dig in the ground and you might pull up the fossils of some strange long-gone organisms. Dive to the bottom of the ocean and you might find them still alive down there, the unmolested records of an ancient world still drifting in slow motion, going about their days-without-days…

For evidence of time-space commutability, settle in for a sublime experience that (like benthic life itself) makes much of very little: just one page, one scroll bar, and one journey to a world beyond.

(Mobile device suggested: this scroll goes in, not just across…)

Learn More:

The “Big Here” doesn’t get much bigger than Neal Agarwal‘s The Size of Space, a new interactive visualization that provides a dose of perspective on our place in the universe.

Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions

Big questions abound regarding the protracted childhood of Homo sapiens, but there’s a growing argument that it’s an adaptation to the increased complexity of our social environment and the need to learn longer and harder in order to handle the ever-raising bar of adulthood. (Just look to the explosion of requisite schooling over the last century for a concrete example of how childhood grows along with social complexity.)

It’s a tradeoff between genetic inheritance and enculturation — see also Kevin Kelly’s remarks in The Inevitable that we have entered an age of lifelong learning and the 21st Century requires all of us to be permanent “n00bs”, due to the pace of change and the scale at which we have to grapple with evolutionarily relevant sociocultural information.

New research from Past Long Now Seminar Speaker Alison Gopnik:

“I argue that the evolution of our life history, with its distinctively long, protected human childhood, allows an early period of broad hypothesis search and exploration, before the demands of goal-directed exploitation set in. This cognitive profile is also found in other animals and is associated with early behaviours such as neophilia and play. I relate this developmental pattern to computational ideas about explore–exploit trade-offs, search and sampling, and to neuroscience findings. I also present several lines of empirical evidence suggesting that young human learners are highly exploratory, both in terms of their search for external information and their search through hypothesis spaces. In fact, they are sometimes more exploratory than older learners and adults.”

Alison Gopnik, “Childhood as a solution to explore-exploit tensions” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.