Stewart Brand's Blog, page 17

The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement

Quantum entanglement. (Courtesy: iStock/Traffic-Analyzer)

We humans are changing. We have become so intertwined with what we have created that we are no longer separate from it. We have 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.

Antoine Lavoisier conducting an experiment related to combustion generated by amplified sun light

In the last age, the Age of Enlightenment, we learned that nature followed laws. By understanding these laws, we could predict and manipulate. We invented science. We learned to break the code of nature and thus empowered, we began to shape the world in the pursuit of our own happiness. We granted ourselves god-like powers: to fly, to communicate across vast distances, to hold frozen moments of sight and sound, to transmute elements, to create new plants and animals. We created new worlds entirely from our imagination. Even Time we harnessed. The same laws that allowed us to explain the motions of the planets, enabled us to build the pendulum of a clock. Thus time itself, once generated by the rhythms of our bodies and the rhythms of the heavens, was redefined by the rhythms of our machines. With our newfound knowledge of natural laws we orchestrated fantastic chains of causes and effect in our political, legal, and economic systems as well as in our mechanisms. Our philosophies neatly separated man and nature, mind and matter, cause and effect. We learned to control.

ENIAC, (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), the first electronic general purpose computer.

Eventually, in the ultimate expression of our Enlightenment exuberance, we constructed digital computers, the very embodiments of cause and effect. Computers are the cathedrals of the Enlightenment, the ultimate expression of logical deterministic control.¹ Through them, we learned to manipulate knowledge, the currency of the Enlightenment, beyond the capacity of our own minds. We constructed new realities. We built complex algorithms with unpredictable behavior. Thus, within this monument to Enlightenment thinking, we sowed the seeds of its demise. We began to build systems with emergent behaviors that grew beyond our own understanding, creating the first crack in the foundation.

The second threat to the foundation of the Enlightenment was in the institutions we created. Our communication technology allowed us to build enterprises of unimaginable scope and capability. A modern corporation or NGO has tens of thousands of people, most of whom have never met one another, who are capable of coordinated action, making decisions that shape the world. Governments are even larger. New kinds of self-organizing collaborations, enabled by our global communications networks, are beginning to emerge. All these kinds of enterprises can become more powerful than the individual humans that created them, and in many senses, they have goals of their own. They tend to act in ways that increase their control of resources and enhance their own survival. They are able to perceive and process far more information than a single human, manipulate more matter and energy, act in more ways and places, command more power, and focus more attention. The individual is no longer the most influential player on the world stage.

As our technological and institutional creations have become more complex, our relationship to them has changed. We now relate to them as we once related to nature. Instead of being masters of our creations, we have learned to bargain with them, cajoling and guiding them in the general direction of our goals. We have built our own jungle, and it has a life of its own.

Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

The final blow to the Enlightenment will come when we build into our machines the power to learn, adapt, create and evolve. In doing so, we will give them the power to surpass us, to shape the world and themselves in ways that we never could have imagined. We have already given our institutions the ability to act on our behalf, and we are destined to have the same uneasy balance of power with our machines. We will make the same attempts to build in checks and balances, to keep their goals aligned with ours. We will face similar challenges. In doing so we need to move far away from the understandable logic of Enlightenment thinking, into something more complicated. We will worry less about the unpredictable forces of nature than about the unpredictable behaviors of our own constructions.

Neri Oxman’s “Silk Pavilion” was made by 6,500 computer-guided silkworms. Photo by Markus Kayser

So what is this brave new world that we are creating, governed neither by the mysteries of nature or the logic of science, but by the magic of their entanglement? It is governed by the mathematics of strange attractors. Its geometry is fractal. Its music is improvisational and generative rather than composed: Eno instead of Mozart. Its art is about process more than artifact. Its roots are in Grey Walter’s cybernetic tortoises,² Marvin Minsky’s randomly wired SNARC learning machine,³ and Nicholas Negroponte’s Seek,⁴ in which the architecture of a living space emerged from the interaction of a observant robot with a horde of gerbils. The aesthetic of the Entanglement is the beauty that emerges from processes that are neither entirely natural nor artificial, but blend the best of both: the webs of Neri Oxman’s silk worms,⁵ ⁶ spun over a robot-wired mesh; the physical telepresence of Hiroshi Ishii’s tactile displays⁷ ⁸ or his living bioLogic fabric.⁹ We can no longer see ourselves as separate from the natural world or our technology, but as a part of them, integrated, codependent, and entangled.

Unlike the Enlightenment, where progress was analytic and came from taking things apart, progress in the Age of Entanglement is synthetic and comes from putting things together. Instead of classifying organisms, we construct them. Instead of discovering new worlds, we create them. And our process of creation is very different. Think of the canonical image of collaboration during the Enlightenment: fifty-five white men in powdered wigs sitting in a Philadelphia room, writing the rules of the American Constitution. Contrast that with an image of the global collaboration that constructed the Wikipedia, an interconnected document that is too large and too rapidly changing for any single contributor to even read.

A beautiful example of an Entanglement process is the use of simulated biologically-inspired algorithms to design artificial objects through evolution and morphogenesis. Multiple designs are mutated, bred and selected over many generations in a process analogous to Darwinian selection. The artifacts created by such processes look very different from those produced by engineering.¹⁰ An evolved motorcycle chassis will look more like a pelvic bone than a bicycle frame.¹¹ A computer program produced by a process of evolutionary design may be as difficult to understand as a neural circuit in the brain. Thus, the artifacts that are designed by these biologically-inspired processes take on both the beneficial and the problematic characteristics of biological organisms.¹² Their beauty is in their functional adaption. This is the elegance of the Entanglement: a new expression of beauty emerging from process. In an Entangled design process, the humans will often have input without control; for example, they may influence aesthetic choices by participating in the selection process or by tuning parameters. Such processes lend themselves to collaboration among multiple machines and multiple humans because the interfaces between the parts are fluid and adaptive. The final product is very much a collaborative effort of humans and machines, often with a superior result. It may exhibit behaviors that are surprising to the humans. Some of these behaviors may be adaptive. For example, early walking machines evolved on the Connection Machine took advantage of an obscure round-off error in the floating-point unit that the human programmers did not even know existed.¹³ In this sense, artifacts created by the entangled processes may have some of the robustness of a biological organism, as well as some of the surprise and delight.

Besides displaying the organic beauty of organisms, such designs may also exhibit their complex inscrutability, since it may not be obvious how the features in the artifact correspond to the functional requirements. For example, it may be difficult to tell the purpose of a particular line of code in an evolved program. In fact, the very concept of it having a specific purpose is probably ill-formed. The notion of functional decomposition comes from the engineering process of arranging components to embody causes and effects, so functional intention is an artifact of the engineering process. Simulated biological processes do not understand the system in the same sense that a human designer does. Instead, they discover what works without understanding, which has both strengths and weaknesses. Entanglement artifacts are simultaneously artificial and natural; they are both made and born. In the Age of Entanglement, the distinction has little significance.

As we are becoming more entangled with our technologies, we are also becoming more entangled with each other. The power (physical, political, and social) has shifted from comprehensible hierarchies to less-intelligible networks. We can no longer understand how the world works by breaking it down into loosely-connected parts that reflect the hierarchy of physical space or deliberate design. Instead, we must watch the flows of information, ideas, energy and matter that connect us, and the networks of communication, trust, and distribution that enable these flows. This, as Joshua Ramo¹⁴ has pointed out, is “the nature of our age.”

So what are we to think about this new relationship with our technology and with each other? Should we fear it or embrace it? The answer is both. Like any new powerful force in the world, like Science, it will be used for both good and evil. And even when it is intended to be used for good, we will make mistakes. Humanity has been dealing with this conundrum ever since the first cooking fire got out of control and burned down the forest. Recognizing this does not absolve us from our responsibility, it reminds us why it is important. We are remaking ourselves, and we need to choose wisely what we are to become.

Hillis, D. (2016). The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement. Journal of Design and Science. https://doi.org/10.21428/1a042043. Redistributed under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Images have been added.

Footnotes

[1] Ramo, J.C. The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks.

[2] Augmented Age. Autodesk University. 11906.

[3] Augmented Age. Autodesk University. 11906.

[4] bioLogic: Natto Cells as Nanoactuators for Shape Changing Interfaces. 1–10.

[5] CAD Is a Lie: Generative Design to the Rescue. Jan. 6.

[6] Control of a Powered Ankle–Foot Prosthesis Based on a Neuromuscular Model. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL SYSTEMS AND REHABILITATION ENGINEERING,. 20, 2.

[7] Evolving 3D Morphology and Behavior by Competition. Artificial life. 1, 4, 353–372.

[8] Physical telepresence: shape capture and display for embodied, computer-mediated remote collaboration. 461–470.

[9] Robotically controlled fiber-based manufacturing as case study for biomimetic digital fabrication. Green Design, Materials and Manufacturing Processes, CRC Press (London). 473–8.

[10] Seek.

[11] Shape Displays: Spatial Interaction with Dynamic Physical Form. Computer Graphics and Applications, IEEE. 35, 5, 5–11.

[12] Silk pavilion: a case study in fiber-based digital fabrication. Proc. Fabricate. 248–255.

[13] Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks. 304–305.

[14] Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. ISBN 1400075998.

AI Unearths New Nazca Line in the Shape of a Humanoid Figure

The Nazca lines in Peru have baffled archaeologists for a century. Photo Credit: Jon Arnold Images Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

In Southern Peru, deep in the Nazca Desert, ancient etchings spread across the landscape. To an observer at ground level, they appear as lines cut into the desert surface. Most are straight, while others curve and change direction, seemingly at random. Viewed from foothills or in the air, however, the etchings are revealed as figurative symbols, or geoglyphs. From this vantage, the Nazca lines take the form of geometric and biometric shapes, depicting plants, animals, and anthropomorphic figures.

The meaning and purpose of the Nazca lines have remained a mystery to archaeologists since their modern discovery in the 01920s. Some theorize that the etchings mark solstice points. Others believe they are artistic offerings to deities in the sky.

Archaeologists estimate the Nazca created several thousand lines between 0200 BCE and 0600 CE, using a methodical process of extracting specific stones to expose the white sands beneath. Researchers have long believed that there are many more Nazca lines yet to be discovered, but traditional methods of identifying the lines are time-consuming and demanding. Additionally, many of the lines have been damaged from floods, and disrupted by roads and infrastructure expansion.

Humanoid figure is the newest addition to the Nazca Lines. Photo Credit: IBM Research.

In recent years, a research team at Yamagata University has turned to an unconventional aid in its search: artificial intelligence. And it’s working better than anyone expected. On 15 November 02019, after decades of fieldwork and with extensive collaboration with IBM and their PAIRS Geoscope, the team announced that a total of 143 new designs had been uncovered.

The AI technology deploys deep-learning algorithms in order to synthesize vast and diverse data from LiDAR, drone and satellite images, to geospatial and geographical surveys. The result is high-fidelity 3-D maps of the surrounding search areas. Next, the AI is taught via a neural network to recognize the data patterns of known lines. The AI then searches for new ones over a stretch of 5 kilometers of terrain.

Left, Humanoid, Right, Humanoid Processed Picture. Photo Credit: Yamagata University IBM Japan.

One of the more curious recent discoveries was the above futuristic-looking humanoid figure.

The image is processed to outline and highlight the etchings for vastly improved visibility. The figure joins a collection of more than 2,000 previously known Nazca Lines. Other symbols include a fish, hermit bird and two-headed snake. In addition, IBM made this detection technology open source so other ventures can gain from the system, for example, to identify crops and improve irrigation management across the globe. The team plans to continue its work using more capable AI systems, like laser mapping data and advanced aerial images.

The project, with angles of both investigation and preservation, aims to document and understand the Nazca Lines as a whole. Once the team have a better understanding of the distribution of the lines, they can accelerate research towards the best way to preserve and protect them.

Learn More



Read Yamagata University’s press release on the newly-discovered geoglyphs.Learn more about the IBM PAIRS geoscope technology that is helping scientists discover more geoglyphs.

The 5 Questions We Need to Answer About Artificial Intelligence — Gurjeet Singh at The Interval

Creators of AI systems have a responsibility to figure out how they might go wrong, and govern them accordingly.

From Gurjeet Singh’s Interval talk, “The Shape of Data and Things to Come.”

About this Talk

Big Data promises unparalleled insights, but the larger the data, the harder they are to find. The key to unlocking them was discovered by mathematicians in the 18th century. A modern mathematician explains how to find patterns in data with new algorithms for old math.

About Gurjeet Singh

Gurjeet Singh is Chief AI Officer and co-founder of Symphony AyasdiAI. He leads a technology movement that emphasizes the importance of extracting insight from data, not just storing and organizing it. Beginning with his tenure as a graduate student in Stanford’s Mathematics Department he has developed key mathematical and machine learning algorithms for Topological Data Analysis (TDA) and their applications. Before starting Ayasdi, he worked at Google and Texas Instruments.

Dr. Singh holds a Technology degree from Delhi University and a Computational Mathematics Ph.D. from Stanford. He serves on the Technology Advisory Board at HSBC and on the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Technology Advisory Committee. He was named to Silicon Valley Business Journal’s “40 Under 40” list in 02015. Gurjeet lives in Palo Alto with his wife and two children and develops multi-legged robots in his spare time.

Is Mars the Solution for Earth’s Problems?

Geologist Marcia Bjornerud and Long Now’s Executive Director Alexander Rose debate about whether going to Mars is a viable long-term sustainability plan for human survival.

From Marcia Bjornerud’s Long Now talk, “Timefulness.”

About the Talk

We need a poly-temporal worldview to embrace the overlapping rates of change that our world runs on, especially the huge, powerful changes that are mostly invisible to us.

Geologist Marcia Bjornerud teaches that kind of time literacy. With it, we become at home in the deep past and engaged with the deep future. We learn to “think like a planet.”

As for climate change… “Dazzled by our own creations,” Bjornerud writes, “we have forgotten that we are wholly embedded in a much older, more powerful world whose constancy we take for granted…. Averse to even the smallest changes, we have now set the stage for environmental deviations that will be larger and less predictable than any we have faced before.”

About Marcia Bjornerud

A professor of geology and environmental studies at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, Marcia Bjornerud is author of Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (2018) and Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth (2005).

Digital Repatriations: Historic Recordings Returned to Passamaquoddy Tribe

Walter Jesse Fewkes records the Passamaquoddy Tribe in 01890. Photo: Passamaquoddy Cultural Heritage Museum.

In 01890, anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes traveled to Eastern Maine to document the Passamaquoddy Tribe. By then, war, disease, and unhonored treaties by local and federal authorities had reduced the tribe to a few hundred members.

Fewkes brought with him one of Thomas Edison’s phonographs — a technology less than a decade old. Over the course of several days, Fewkes recorded members of the tribe singing, telling stories, and providing basic pronunciation examples of words for things like numbers and days onto large, wax cylinders in 3 minute increments.

The Fewkes recordings represented a significant ethnographic advancement for the burgeoning field of Anthropology. It was the first time sounds had ever been recorded in the field. The recordings were given to Boston’s Peabody Museum, and acquired by the Library of Congress in 01976. It wasn’t until the 01980s, when the Library of Congress informed the Passamaquoddy of their existence, that any tribal members heard the recordings. The Passamaquoddy discovered that some material that was considered sacred and not meant to be heard outside of the tribe, such as a funeral ceremony, had been available for the general public to listen to for years.

The knowledge of the recordings came at a time of resurgence for the Passamaquoddy following a century of hardship. As E. Tammy Kim, writing in The New Yorker, puts it: “For decades, tribal members had suffered extreme poverty, seen their language banned by the Catholic priests and nuns who oversaw the reservations, and lost their kids to the child-welfare system.” But the Tribe recently won a landmark land claims settlement, and was awarded funds to purchase 150,000 acres of land. This resulted in many displaced tribal members returning to the tribe’s two reservations. Many of these “off-reservation returnees” were disconnected from Passamaquoddy culture. Some had intermarried, and did not speak the Passamaquoddy language. The Passamaquoddy Tribe estimates that 70% of its members could speak the language 30 years ago. Today, only 12% of its 3,600 members are fluent.

Those statistics may soon change. In recent years, technological advances in audio restoration, coupled with Passamaquoddy activism around preserving tribal culture and language, has led to the Library of Congress launching a new project of “digital repatriation” for the Passamaquoddy recordings called “Ancestral Voices.” The project’s goal is to confer curatorial control of the recordings back to the Tribe.

The process of enacting digital repatriations involves both technological and anthropological hurdles. The recordings are first cleaned for clarity of sound. There is still the crackle of age, but the content is now clearly audible and understandable. Next is the assignment of “Traditional Knowledge Labels,” a system developed by Professor Jane Anderson of New York University. Traditional Knowledge Labeling is “‘designed to identify and clarify which material has community-specific restrictions regarding access and use.”

This label, Ma yut monuwasiw , means ‘This is not sold’- a recording with this label designates it as strictly not for commercial use.This label means ‘Educational’- Ekehkimkewey- It will be found next to recordings that the Passamaquoddy have allowed to be shared for educational purposes.

These labels work to prevent future mis-use of indigenous recordings and ensure that sacred material culture stays within the community and not widely disseminated, as has happened in the past.

Dwayne Tomah transcribing and translating a wax cylinder recording. Photo by Robbie Feinberg/Maine Public.

The transcription, translation and interpretation of the recordings required speakers of the Passamaquoddy language. In an interview with Art Canvas, Dwayne Tomah, a current member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe, found this to be an emotional and poignant process:

“I really wept. Hearing their voices. Knowing that I’m probably one of the last fluent speakers on the reservation. And that we’re still continuing this process to be able to revitalize our language and bring it back to life again, so to speak. And give it some attention that it really deserves.”

One of the main results from the digital repatriation was the creation of the Passamaquoddy Peoples’ Knowledge Portal. The entire recording collection can be found here, along with historical context, films, vocabulary guides and photographs. This website provides continuity between the past, present and future of the Tribe, providing a space and access for future Passamaquoddy generations to learn ancestral and traditional knowledge.

Members of the Passamaquoddy tribe dancing during a traditional tribal inauguration ceremony in August 02015. Photo via Island Institute.

“Language is both an embodiment of human culture, as well as the primary means of its maintenance and transmission,” writes Dr. Laura Welcher, a linguist and Director of Long Now’s long-term language archiving Rosetta Project. “When languages are lost, the transmission of traditional culture is often abruptly severed.” In seeking to correct erasures, reverse the extinction of languages, and reconstitute ritual, repatriation projects aim to restore this cultural transmission. Once indigenous people hear the voices of their ancestors that has previously been denied to them, it empowers them to reclaim their voice in the here and now.

Learn More



Explore the Passamaquoddy Peoples’ Knowledge Portal, where you can listen to Fewkes recordings.Read E. Tammy Kim’s piece in The New Yorker on the digital repatriations project. Learn more about the usage of Traditional Knowledge labels. 

The role of 80-million year-old rocks in American slavery — Lewis Dartnell at The Interval

When cretaceous-age rocks in the Southern US eroded over millions of years, they produced a uniquely rich, fertile soil that landowners realized was ideal for growing cash crops such as cotton. It was the soil from these rocks that slaves toiled over in the era of American slavery—and the same ground that ultimately became the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement.

From Lewis Dartnell’s talk at The Interval, “ORIGINS: How Earth’s history shaped human history.”

About the talk

From the cultivation of the first crops to the founding of modern states, the human story is the story of environmental forces, from plate tectonics and climate change, to atmospheric circulation and ocean currents.

Professor Lewis Dartnell will dive into the planet’s deep past, where history becomes science, to explore a web of connections that underwrites our modern world, and that can help us face the challenges of the future.

About Lewis Dartnell

Lewis Dartnell is a Professor of Science Communication at the University of Westminster. Before that, he completed his biology degree at the University of Oxford and his PhD at UCL, and then worked as the UK Space Agency research fellow at the University of Leicester, studying astrobiology and searching for signs of life on Mars. He has won several awards for his science writing and contributes to the Guardian, The Times, and New Scientist. He is also the author of three books. He lives in London, UK.

Experiencing Deep Time Through Visual Storytelling

Geological Time Spiral

Deep time is a notoriously hard concept to grasp. Our lived human experience is grounded in a timeframe that is at odds with the geological time frame of millions or billions of years. Since geologists began figuring out the true scale of geologic time, they have tried to communicate this scale through a series of metaphors, maps, and visualizations. Famous examples of this include Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar, and for children, Montessori’s Clock of Eras. Advances in mapping and data visualization technologies have enabled new forms of visual storytelling for understanding these time frames. Two visualizations have been recently developed that address the temporal depth and endurance of our universe in novel and effective ways.

Deep Time Walk

Deep Time Walk is an engaging and innovative app that transforms deep time into an embodied experience, a mobile virtual time travel. Listeners plug headphones in and walk the entire journey of Earth’s 4.6 billion year-old history in just 4.6km.

Deep Time Walk app.

Deep Time Walk uses a dramatized dialogue between a questioning protagonist and patient scientist to explain complex topics in a relatable format. Written as a collaboration between playwright Peter Oswald and Dr. Stephan Harding, Deep Time Walk guides you to walk and encounter evolutionary significant events, from the emergence of volcanoes to the first appearance of oxygen-producing photosynthesis. You, the listener and walker, are frequently addressed, to check you are still following as you walk 2 million years in just 2 meters.

Narrative is a powerful tool for connection and understanding. By creating a story with relatable characters, Deep Time Walk removes the listener from the present and walks them into the distant past. The conversational (and sometimes poetic) storytelling produces empathy and connection, which works to ground the individual personally into this global enduring epic.

This translation of time into distance creates an effective microcosm by transforming the complexity of 1,000,000 years into the comprehensible and familiar metric of one meter. Through this, Deep Time Walk claims to help users understand ‘the destructive impact we are now having on the Earth’s complex climate in the blink of a geological eye.’

Ancient Earth

Ancient Earth, a temporal map of the world, approaches deep time differently. Built as an interactive tool, Ancient Earth works to visualize the extensive geographic and tectonic shifts of the last 750 million years and maps them comparatively onto the globe of today. Developed by Ian Webster, the curator of the world’s largest digital dinosaur database, with the use of C.R. Scotese’s paleogeographic maps, Ancient Earth captures deep time in physical space, on Earth.

450 millions years ago, Late Ordovician era. The pink dot is New York City. (Ian Webster/Ancient Earth)

Ancient Earth catapults the viewer back to the emergence of single-celled organisms, such as green algae, in the Cryogenian ice age 750 million years ago, before leaping ahead 320 million years to the Silurian Period, when mass extinctions coincided with progression of complex life on land. What is most striking about this ancient world is that it is barely recognizable; it looks disarmingly dark, cold and watery.

Sliding forward to 240 million years ago, the user encounters another equally distorted Earth; one landmass, Pangea, dominated as the singular supercontinent that encompassed the world. The map has plenty of useful features, from simple yet effective dropdown time jump options, such as the evolution of the first flowers, to location-specific searches, enabling users to track the journey of their hometown across both time and space. As Meilan Solly writes in a piece for The Smithsonian, “interested parties can now superimpose the political boundaries of today onto the geographic formations of yesteryear.”

What both Ancient Earth and Deep Time Walk achieve is compelling because of their user experience. Both engage directly with the individual and bring them into a narrative: Deep Time Walk is an embodied experience and drama; Ancient Earth encourages you to map your hometown across the ages. By making it relatable and personal, these apps start to help us conceptualize deep time.

Learn More



Watch geologist Marcia Bjornerud’s 02019 Long Now talk about deep time, “Timefulness.”Read “How the Concept of Deep Time is Changing” in The Atlantic.

Move Slow and Preserve Things

La French Tech recently interviewed Long Now Director of Development Nicholas Paul Brysiewicz on the appropriate role of long-term thinking in an increasingly accelerated world.

A Trips Festival for the Digital Age

Leading up to each edition of Sónar is a visual messaging campaign that’s come to be known as the SónarImage. This year’s SónarImage, above, was a short film, ‘Je te tiens’, directed by Sónar co-founder Sergio Caballero.

Two series of radio transmissions are currently beaming through interstellar space — bound, their senders hope, for intelligent life on a distant planet. The transmissions contain 38 encoded pieces of music, each ten seconds in length, created by far-out but nonetheless earth-bound musicians.

At this writing, the first of the transmissions will have recently exited the Oort cloud, an expanse of icy cometary nuclei made of cosmic dust. It is expected to reach its destination, the exoplanet GJ273b, on November 3rd, 02030–12.5 years after it was sent from Earth. The second transmission will arrive six months later.

The exoplanet, known as Luyten’s Star, appears to meet the necessary conditions to harbor life. If it does, and if it is intelligent life, and if its denizens deign to reply, the soonest Earthlings can hope to hear back is 02043.

For the organizers of Sónar, an arts, design and electronic music festival in Barcelona, Spain, that would constitute perfect timing. The festival partnered with METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) to send the radio transmissions last year for its 25th anniversary celebration, with the hope that it might get a response time for its 50th.

A satellite in Tromsø, Norway, where the Sónar festival, in partnership with METI, sent radio transmissions to a potentially habitable exoplanet.

A multi-decade project to contact alien life might not seem like typical festival fare. But Sónar isn’t a typical festival. For over a quarter century, it has sought to bridge the worlds of art and technology, the popular and the avant garde, and club culture and cyberculture. Each edition of the festival offers a glimpse of possible futures and frontiers, from the latest technological advances in artificial intelligence and quantum computing to the next trends in music and multimedia art. The music festival is coupled with Sónar+D, a four-day technology and design conference of talks, workshops, immersive experiences, and exhibitions.

Sónar epitomizes what Stanford historian Fred Turner calls a network forum — a place “within which members of multiple communities [can] meet and collaborate and imagine themselves as members of a single community”:

Within the network forum, […] contributors create new rhetorical tools with which to express and facilitate their new collaborations. Network forums need not be confined to media. Think tanks, conferences, even open-air markets—all can serve as forums in which one or more entrepreneurs gather members of multiple networks, allow them to communicate and collaborate, and so facilitate the formation of both new networks and new contact languages.

Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (02006), Chicago University Press, pp. 72–3.

Madeline Gannon teaches a masterclass at Sónar+D 02019 on “The Future of Humans and Machines: Human-Robot Interaction across the arts, sciences, and society.”

José Luis de Vicente, the lead curator of Sónar+D, describes the festival’s curatorial approach as anti-disciplinary.

“Sónar pioneered a model where the lines between musician, visual artist, technologist and sometimes even entrepreneur are really blurred,” de Vicente tells me. “We wanted to be a vessel for people who transition between those spaces.”

But then he pauses — realizing, perhaps, that he’s made too bold a claim.

“You know, there’s a problem in this community where we always think we’re inventing everything from scratch,” he says. “But there’s easily 50 years of tradition in this kind of thing.”

Scenes from the 01966 Trips Festival.

That tradition began, de Vicente says, with the 01966 Trips Festival, a watershed moment in the history of American counterculture that inaugurated the psychedelic sixties. The three-day event, held in San Francisco’s Longshoreman’s Hall, was organized by future Long Now co-founder Stewart Brand, whom de Vicente calls a “godfather of digital culture.” At the time, Brand was part of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, an outfit of psychedelic enthusiasts who had begun throwing parties (dubbed ‘Acid Tests’) some months prior.

Stewart Brand and Ken Kesey, 01966. California Historical Society.

The Acid Tests were small, haphazard and sketchy affairs, taking place in houses, on beaches, and in small music venues. Attendees helped themselves to LSD served out of trash containers and danced all night under multi-colored lights to the improvised noodlings of an up-and-coming blues band called the Warlocks, soon to be the Grateful Dead.

There was talk amongst the Pranksters of throwing a bigger party — fire a flare into the San Francisco sky and see who comes. But the Pranksters, for all their spontaneity, lacked a certain organizational focus.

“I knew in my heart that we were not going to be able to pull that off,” Brand recalled. “But that it ought to happen.” Brand, along with electronic music composer Ramón Sender, took it upon themselves to make it so. They secured Longshoreman’s Hall as a venue and enlisted the help of concert promoter Bill Graham.

The California Historical Society sets the scene:

Over 10,000 people, many taking LSD, attended the three-day event. Although the event included music, it was not billed as a concert per se. Rather, it was promoted as an immersive and participatory multi-media experience. Virtually the entire Bay Area’s avant-garde arts scene was involved, including the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Open Theater, the Dancer’s Workshop and the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Yet it was the performances by emerging rock music groups the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company which captured the attention of attendees. It was the first major performance by the Dead in San Francisco, and the combination of the band’s music, the hall’s sound system and the visually captivating light shows over the three days that created a format that would soon dominate the city’s music halls. Bill Graham took over the Fillmore Auditorium for good just two week later, and his first weekend was advertised as the “sights and sounds of the Trips Festival.” As Tom Wolfe says in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, “the Haight-Ashbury era began that weekend.” The world would never be the same.

Trips Festival poster. “This is the FIRST gathering of its kind anywhere,” the poster reads. “The TRIP — or electronic performance — is a new medium of communication and entertainment.”

“The Trips Festival was the original event saying a show should be a multi-sensorial experience,” de Vicente says. It was also an early originator of the idea that engineers and artists could work together in fruitful collaboration, a model that drove the San Francisco Bay Area’s transition from counterculture to cyberculture over the second half of the twentieth century. Finally, the Trips Festival introduced the notion of “no spectators,” which Stewart Brand defines as “the idea that an audience shows up to a certain kind of event expecting to do something, not just to see something.” “No Spectators” later became a guiding principle of both rave culture and festivals like Burning Man. 

Another lesser known but equally pivotal chapter in the multimedia artistic tradition that gave rise to Sónar occurred in New York City, at the 69th Regiment Armory, nine months after the Trips Festival. 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering sought to bridge the worlds of art and technology through showcasing collaborations between avant garde artists and engineers from Bell Labs.

Robert Rauschenberg’s “Open Score” performed at 9 Evenings. La Critique.

The project was started by Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver and graphic artist Robert Rauschenberg, who later founded Experiments in Art and Technology to further explore the artistic possibilities of electric space. In the ten months leading up to 9 Evenings, Bell Labs engineers worked with artists John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Merce Cunningham, Öyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, and Robert Whitman to create technologies that would enable new forms of artistic expression:

Their collaboration produced many “firsts” in the use of new technology for the theater, both with specially-designed systems and equipment and with innovative use of existing equipment. Closed-circuit television and television projection was used on stage for the first time; a fiber-optics camera picked up objects in a performer’s pocket; an infrared television camera captured action in total darkness; a Doppler sonar device translated movement into sound; and portable wireless FM transmitters and amplifiers transmitted speech and body sounds to Armory loudspeakers.

“9 Evenings didn’t really look like an exhibition in a museum,” de Vicente says. “It looked way more like what Sónar By Night looks like — which is a huge dark hangar with thousands of people watching something that you wouldn’t naturally recognize as a performance.”

Sónar 01997.

Fast forward to 01994. Analog has given way to digital, the “happening” has given way to the rave and the club, and the amplified electricity of psychedelic rock has given way to the thumping bass of electronic dance music.

“DJs were already superstars,” writes music journalist James Davidson, “but the thriving club scene needed its Mecca — and […] it was left to three Catalans to give birth to the festival that now defines its genre.”

Quantum Garden by Aalto University, at SonarHub, 02019.

Sónar was founded by music journalist Ricard Robles and musicians/visual artists Enric Palau and Sergio Caballero. They billed the first gathering in 01994 as the “Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art.” A Record and Technology Fair — what would later evolve into the Sónar+D conference — took place alongside the festival, which was attended by some 6,000 people. (Today, attendance at Sónar has swelled to over 126,000 people, with approximately 6,000 professionals participating in its Sónar+D conference.)

“When Sónar started in the mid 01990s, it contained that element [from the Trips Festival and 9 Evenings] of investigating this spectrum that an event can be both popular and avant garde at the same time,” de Vicente says. “You have this clash of people who would normally be in the space of experimental electronics with the people who are part of the audience of club culture, techno and house, and they mingle in very interesting ways.” 

Over the years, this mingling expanded to include members of research departments in universities and the first hacker spaces, which emerged as new centers of creativity with the rise of the web.

Memo Akten’s Deep Meditations at Sónar+D 02019.

It’s a heady, and at times overwhelming, brew. Days at Sónar start soberly at the Fira Montjuic convention center, with lanyard-donning techies attending panels and talks on quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and the future of the internet; perusing a technology trade fair (dubbed the SónarHub) where hackers hawk their latest prototypes; or experiencing the latest in cutting edge, immersive multimedia art, like Memo Akten’s Deep Meditations installation, a “slow, meditative, meticulously crafted journey of slowly evolving images and sounds — through the imagination of an artificial neural network trained on everything(literally images labelled ‘everything’ from the photo sharing website Flickr), as well other abstract, subjective concepts such aslife, love, art, faith, ritual, worship, god, nature, universe, cosmos and many more.”

Attendees help themselves to paella at Sónar 02019.

The character of the event changes markedly in the afternoon, when Sónar by Day begins. Thumping bass echoes through the festival grounds that now teem with club culture enthusiasts, attendance swelling by the hour.At the SónarVillage, an outdoor pavilion flanked by food trucks and beer stalls, DJs regale the paella-eating masses.

Holly Herndon performing PROTO at Sónar 02019.Daito Manabe performing Dissonant Imaginary at Sónar 02019.

On smaller stages throughout the venue, avant garde artists debut new visions of the ambient frontier, like musician and programmer Holly Herndon’s new show/album PROTO, which she collaborated on with an artificial intelligence she dubs “Spawn,” or Daito Manabe’s AV tech experience that uses an MRI scanner that visualizes brain states reacting to the music being played.

Musician, visual artist, and Long Now co-founder Brian Eno delivering the keynote address at Sónar 02016.Massive Attack’s Andrew Melchior and Robert del Naja in conversation at Sónar 02019.

A keynote address is delivered in the late afternoon in the convention auditorium. (In 02016, that honor fell to Long Now co-founder Brian Eno.) This year, Robert del Naja, the frontman of Massive Attack, discussed his band’s methodology of combining generative art, music and technology, as well as its recent project of encoding its debut album into DNA that can be sprayed from an aerosol can.

Björk performing at Sónar 02017.

Once darkness falls, attendees flood a different venue across Barcelona, the Fira Gran Via, for Sónar by Night. Tens of thousands of people pack overcrowded, sweaty hangars and dance until dawn, taking occasional breaks to hit the bumper car course. The music here is decidedly more mainstream, and over the years has featured the likes of Daft Punk, Kraftwerk, Björk, and Thom Yorke. DJs dominate the hours after midnight, with some playing six-hour sets. Once the sun rises, Sónar attendees are provided a brief reprieve before the festivities begin again in the late morning.

“Sónar is not a festival that values sleeping,” a Sónar veteran told me at del Naja’s keynote. “But the future is worth staying up for.”

Immersive Hub installation at SonarHub.

In recent years, Sónar has expanded its time horizon of the future to focus on coming centuries and millennia. As humanity grapples with multigenerational challenges like climate change and rapid technological advance, there’s been an increased emphasis on long-term thinking at Sónar — evidenced by both the themes and projects of Sónar and the ideas presented by speakers themselves.

Jay Springett, on stage, left, at a panel on the future of the internet, Sónar 02019.

“There is a deficiency of long-term thinking in western culture,” Jay Springett, a London based theorist, said at a panel on the future of the internet at this year’s Sónar+D. “It will be vital that we think at multigenerational time depths about everything from internet technologies to tree planting, given the challenges that humanity faces. Our modern world seeks to focus us towards the short-term, and praises quarterly growth. But in the real world, away from high frequency ledger entries and global capital flows, it takes 100–120 years for an oak tree to grow from seed to full canopy height. It takes three human generations to grow a tree. This is real growth. And I’d like to propose that everything that occurs in the duration between the decision to plant an acorn to the tree’s full grown crown is short-term thinking.”

The site of the SonarCalling transmissions in Tromsø, Norway.

SónarCalling, the festival’s attempt to message extraterrestrials, is Sónar’s most ambitious long-term project to date. It served as an organizing principle for the festival’s 25th anniversary, grounding its lines of inquiry around questions of exploration, messaging, intelligence, and designing for longevity.

“Sónar has always been about exploring and scanning the musical cultures of the planet,” de Vicente says. Broadening Sónar’s scope beyond Earth, de Vicente says, requires thinking in different scales of space — which necessarily implies deeper explorations of time.

Installation of pieces of the 10,000 Year Clock.

To that end, Sónar invited Alexander Rose, Executive Director at Long Now, to speak about the 10,000 Year Clock and what it’s taught Long Now about thinking about problems in millennial time scales. Rose emphasized that central value of the Clock lies not in the object itself, but in the myth of long-term thinking it can help inspire.

“Some of the truly multi-millennial artifacts we have in civilization are stories,” Rose said, citing the Epic of Gilgamesh as an example. “What we’re really trying to do is build a story. The Clock is the mechanism by which a myth can hopefully be created. If the Clock lasts, great. But if it creates enough of a story, that myth could probably outlast the Clock by thousands of years.”

The engineering challenges in building a 10,000 year object were unprecedented, to be sure. But with the Clock nearing completion, the real challenge, Rose said, is building a 10,000 year institution that protects the Clock and keeps it relevant.

“We’re crossing an interesting time,” Rose said. “By the time we’re about 25 years old — the same age as this festival — we will have finished this very experimental phase, and will move into a phase where this very notional, perfect object that we’ve talked about is now going to be real and in the world and open to criticism. So moving forward, it’s going to be a very different institution, I think, than it has been up to now.”

Sónar finds itself in a similar moment of reflection, now that it has reached its 25-year-milestone. “We are trying to create a conversation that can only happen at 25 year intervals,” de Vicente says of the SónarCalling project. “It’s a way of asking what things will be like at the fiftieth edition of the festival.”

José Luis de Vicente, curator of Sónar+D.

Asking what the festival will be like in 25 years is implicitly a question about where things stand today. De Vicente, who was part of that first generation of technologists who started getting online in the early 01990s when the web was undergirded by techno-utopian principles, has lately found himself questioning what kind of art and technology event digital culture needs in its current fraught, polarized moment.

“We have never been in such a critical moment of dissatisfaction, of acknowledgment that a lot of these cultures that we built are not making society a better place,” he says. “It’s hard not to be cynical. But at the same time, it’s pretty exciting. These events are artifacts, they are devices. We’re going need different kinds of devices for shaping of the next stage of digital culture, to recapture that energy of possibility from the early days of the web.”

There’s reason to be optimistic that Sónar, as one of the world’s most forward-looking festivals, will be a leader in shaping what that next stage looks like, as it has been in the past. And that in 02043, if an intelligent civilization from beyond the solar system decides we’re worthy of a response, there’ll be a crowd of artists and technologists dancing to the strange sounds of an avant garde future in the city of Barcelona, eager to receive the message.

Learn More



Keep up with the SonarCalling audio transmissions as they make their way across the cosmos.Watch talks from this year’s edition of Sónar+D.Read Long Now’s interview with Sónar curator José Luis de Vicente about the role of art in addressing climate change. Read Fred Turner’s From Cyberculture to Counterculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (02006) for more on the history that gave rise to events like Sónar.

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