Stewart Brand's Blog, page 8

The Paleoclimate & You: How Ancient Climatological Data Helps Us Understand Modern Climate Change

Sediment cores like these can help uncover the deep climatological history of the earth and provide insight into our climate futures. Courtesy of Hannes Grobe AWI/CRP

The 02021 Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, widely known as the 02021 IPCC report, is a massive document. Drawing on more than 14,000 studies, the report synthesizes the state of contemporary climate science. It paints a dire picture of the possible futures for earth’s climate, predicting warming of at least 2.5 degrees celsius by 02100 barring a rapid drawdown in carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere.

In outlining its conclusions on the next century of the earth’s climate, the IPCC report uses a large amount of historical data. Much of this data is of relatively recent vintage, reaching back through the last 150 to 200 years of verifiable, scientifically collected observations. From these data points, the report can conclude, for example, that over the last decade Arctic sea ice has contracted to its lowest average area since at least 01850. Yet the IPCC report also draws on a far older dataset: the paleoclimate record. 

The paleoclimate record is not contained in any one archive, and stretches far beyond human recorded history. It is found in nature’s own memory: sediment, peat, and glacier ice records that stretch back more than 100,000 years in earth’s history in some cases. In a recent interview following the publication of the IPCC report, lead author Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at the Georgia University of Technology, told Scientific American that paleoclimate data allowed the IPCC to “capture the full breadth of natural variability in Earth’s climate system” in a way that human records over the past 150 years simply could not.

The tell-tale ash layer shown in this Antarctic ice core indicates the Toba supervolcano eruption, which occurred in northern Sumatra 75,000 years ago. Courtesy of Guillaume Dargaud 

Paleoclimate cores help us understand what the ecological and geological consequences of 2+ celsius degree warming, unprecedented in recent history, would look like in the long-term. By revisiting sediment core slices dated back to the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago, we can observe the conditions that an extended period of climate 2 degrees above modern preindustrial earth lead to: a completely melted ice sheet, with sea levels five to ten meters above modern levels.

Of course, Cobb notes, “None of Earth’s past warm periods is an appropriate analogue for what we’re seeing today.” The past interglacial period was reached over the course of thousands of years of gradual warming — a snail’s pace compared to the rapid change in climate since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

Learn More

Read Cobb’s full interview with Scientific American’s Katarina ZimmerRead the executive summary of the IPCC report, including its paleoclimate findingsFor another creatively-sourced analysis of historical climate data, watch historian Brian Fagan’s 02007 Seminar on how “We Are Not the First to Suffer Through Climate Change,” focusing on how vineyard harvest records from 00800-01250 CE show the warming climate of medieval Europe.

The Historical Land Practices Behind California’s Fires

The skies of the Bay Area turned orange in September 02020, as the smoke from the complex of wildfires throughout the Bay overwhelmed the sky. Image courtesy of Long Now Speaker and photographer Christopher Michel.

Here at Long Now’s offices in San Francisco, we are in the midst of California’s fire season. The fire season is an ever-expanding span of time typically judged to peak between August and October, though the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has warned for years of the dawn of a nearly year-round season. The Dixie Fire, now almost half contained, spread over 700,000 acres of land in the Northeast of the state, while the Monument Fire to its West still rages over the comparatively small span of 150,000 acres. 

Fire has always been a part of California’s ecology. The plant life of the state, from the dusty chaparral of the central and southern coasts to the giant sequoias of the state’s redwood forests, has adapted to millions of years of natural, lightning-sparked fire through fire-germinated and heat-resistant seeds. Yet blazes of this size, frequency, and persistence throughout the year are unprecedented, one-in-a-century events happening on a near-annual basis. 

Controlled burns once allowed for trees like this sequoia to grow, and may be key for reducing the risk of more disastrous, uncontrolled fires. Image courtesy of Matt Holly/NPS

The causes of the fire season’s intensification in recent years are many. Climate change is a driver for many of them, from the increasingly dry climate of the state to the earlier beginning of snowmelt from the Sierras. Yet an older set of human decisions about the earth also plays a key role. In 02016, ecologist Stephen Pyne gave a Seminar at Long Now about the history of humanity’s relationship with fire, including the “century of misdirection about wildfire” brought about by the exportation of European norms on fire safety to the drier, fire-germinated ecosystems of the Americas and Asia.

In The Drift, anthropologist Jordan Thomas lays out how the shift in California specifically from Indigenous Californian fire practices, which typically included controlled, intentional burns, to European and later American fire suppression has increased the size and damage caused by wildfires.

As the 20th century ticked by, forests became tinderboxes. Just as fuel accumulated in the trees, carbon accumulated in the atmosphere, and with each slight temperature increase, high-risk burn zones spread outwards from the mountains. Meanwhile, populations spread farther from urban cores, increasing the chance of fire ignitions.These factors have converged to ensure that fires, when they do occur, are now explosive. Forest managers are beginning to backtrack against the Euro-American legacy of fire suppression inherited from Arrillaga and his heirs, but, as fire seasons expand and winter months contract, they may be running out of time.

Fire suppression policies have shaped California’s ecosystems since the days of Spanish colonialism in the region, and only strengthened over the course of the prevention-focused twentieth century regime of the U.S. Forest Service. In recent years, land stewardship and Indigenous rights groups in Northern California and elsewhere have pushed for greater investment in traditional fire management practices, drawing on millennia of successful human-ecosystem management to deal with a modern crisis.

Learn More:

For the full story, which includes first hand accounts of firefighting through the Dolan Fire of August 02020, read Thomas’ piece in The Drift here.Ecologist Laura Cunningham’s 02011 Seminar about Ten Millennia of California Ecology provides a long and broad view of the ecological systems that have shaped Californian lifeScience Journalist and Historian Charles C. Mann’s 02012 Seminar about Living in the Homogenocene grapples with what he terms the “eco-convulsions” of the past 500 years, including mass deforestation events.

A Global History of Trade, As Told Through Peppers

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides an enlightening window into the history of global trade and human population movement through a perhaps surprising source: pepper genetics. The study bases its findings on a dataset of over 10,000 pepper (C. annuum) genomes collected from gene banks the world over. A research team led by Dr. Pasquale Tripodi of the Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (CREA) in Italy devised a novel method to compare relative genotypic overlaps, or RGOs, between pepper samples from different regions.

The study’s method for comparing the genetic makeup of different regional pepper samples allowed for measurement of regional uniqueness and hypothetical patterns of trade. Source: PNAS

The study’s findings show that peppers — one species with a range of cultivars from mild bell peppers to exceptionally spicy bird’s eye chili peppers —  have for centuries been a hotly traded commodity on the global market. While culinary historians have long held that peppers were brought to Europe and then the Middle East, Africa, and Asia as part of the colonization of their original home in the Americas, the lack of solid trade records at many points along this network previously left much of their route ambiguous. The study provides a plausible, genetics-driven history of pepper trade, showcasing a complex, multi-directional pattern of spread over the course of five centuries of global commerce. 

Learn More:

Read the original study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesWatch Lewis Dartnell’s 02019 Long Now Talk that explores how environmental forces shaped trade and the cultivation of the first crops. 

Letters to the Future Uses Plastic Waste To Send Lasting Messages

3 bound copies of the Letters to the Future Project. Source: Letters to the future

In our efforts to foster long-term thinking and preservation, we at Long Now do not typically think of single use plastic as an ally. Yet that’s precisely what the non-profit art project Letters to the future does, harnessing plastic’s lack of biodegradability to make a point about what we as a society leave behind not just to our children and grandchildren, but our great-great-great grandchildren as well.

A person standing over some sheets of recycled plastic, preparing it for processing. Source: Letters to the future

Letters to the future takes plastic collected from the streets of Vietnam and uses it as the paper for a series of over 300 letters written from all over the world, addressed to the writers’ descendants five generations hence. 

A closeup of one of the letters contained within the project, including text in Arabic script and in English. Source: Letters to the future

The project was conceived of by Vietnamese creative agency Ki Saigon and funded by Vietnam-based pizza restaurant chain 4P’s to commemorate the 10th anniversary of their founding. 

Learn More

Check out the Letters to the future website for more insight into their vision and process.Watch Susan Freinkel’s 02012 Long Now Talk on how to get the benefits of plastic’s amazing durability while reducing the harm from its convenient disposability.

How Long is Now?

[image error]“It is Time” (02020) by Alicia Eggert in collaboration with David Moinina Sengeh. The neon sign was commissioned by TED and Fine Acts for TED Countdown, and driven around Dallas, Texas on October 10th, 02020 to generate action around climate change. Photo by Vision & Verve.I. Time

The most commonly-used noun in the English language is, according to the Oxford English Corpus, time. Its frequency is partly due to its multiplicity of meanings, and partly due to its use in common phrases. Above all, “time” is ubiquitous because what it refers to dictates all aspects of human life, from the hour we rise to the hour we sleep and most everything in between.

But what is time? The irony, of course, is that it’s hard to say. Trying to pin down its meaning using words can oftentimes feel like grasping at a wriggling fish. The 4th century Christian theologian Saint Augustine sums up the dilemma well:

But what in speaking do we refer to more familiarly and knowingly than time? And certainly we understand when we speak of it; we understand also when we hear it spoken of by another. What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.

Most of us are content to live in a world where time is simply what a clock reads. The interdisciplinary artist Alicia Eggert is not. Through co-opting clocks and forms of commercial signage (billboards, neon signs, inflatable nylon of the kind that animates the air dancers in the parking lots of auto dealerships), Eggert makes conceptual art that invites us to experience the dimensions of time through the language we use to talk about it.

Her art draws on theories of time from physics and philosophy, like the inseparability of time and space and the difference between being and becoming. She expresses these oftentimes complex ideas through simple words and phrases we make use of in our everyday lives, thereby making them tangible and relatable.

“Between Now and Then” (02018) by Alicia Eggert.

Take the words “now” and “then.” In its most narrow sense, “now” means this moment. But it can be broadened to refer to today, this year, this century, et cetera. “Then” can mean both the past and the future. Eggert’s “Between Now and Then” explores how these two time relationships depend on one another. The words “NOW” and “THEN” are inflatable sculptures of nylon connected to the same air source. The fan is reversible, so one word literally sucks the air out of the other.

[image error]“All The Time” (02012) by Alicia Eggert.

In the philosophy of time, those who ascribe to eternalism believe all time is equally real, and that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. In “All the Time,” Eggert gives this philosophical approach material form by altering a clock to give it twelve functioning hour hands.

[image error]“All the Light You See” (02017–02019) by Alicia Eggert. Photo by Ryan Strand Greenberg.

On the roof of a convenience store in Philadelphia is the permanent installation “All the Light You See.” The neon sign alternates between two statements: “All the light you see is from the past” and “All you see is past.” It also turns off completely for a brief time.

“It speaks to the fact that light takes time to travel, so by the time it reaches your eyes, everything you are seeing is technically already in the past,” Eggert writes in a description of the artwork. “Light from the moon left its surface 1.5 seconds ago; sunlight travels for 8 minutes and 19 seconds before it touches your skin. The farther out into space we look, the farther back in time we can see.”

“There are different levels to my work,” Eggert tells me. “At the surface level, it’s extremely accessible and understandable by most people. But then you can peel away the different layers, think more deeply about what it is actually saying, and have the opportunity to ask those big existential questions or have those reflective, introspective moments.”

II. Eternity

Eggert lives in Denton, Texas, where she is professor of sculpture and studio art at the University of North Texas. Her work has been exhibited at cultural institutions throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Alicia Eggert next to her light sculpture, “This Present Moment.” Photo by Vision & Verve.

Both her interest in time and her focus on making her art accessible come from a surprising source: evangelical Christianity.

“I was raised in an environment where all these ideas about eternity, the afterlife, and why we’re here were planted in me from an early age,” she says. “That’s kind of all you talk about at church.”

She was born into a religious family in Camden, New Jersey, in 01981. She attended church — where her father was a Pentecostal minister — twice every Sunday, and again on Wednesdays.

“In different religions, there are different levels of importance placed on whether or not people actually understand or feel moved by the scripture or the message,” she says. “Unlike in a Catholic church that speaks Latin during the service, in the Pentecostal church I grew up in, the goal was to bring people into the fold and make sure everyone felt welcome and understood what was going on: ‘We’re talking about big, crazy, things, but we’re going to put it in this package that you can swallow.’ I think that was somehow embedded in me.”

While Eggert was influenced by the medium, she was more skeptical of the message.In the Christian worldview she was taught, life on Earth was suffering. Deliverance came only in the eternal hereafter.

“Something about that just kind of struck me as really wrong,” she says. “We have this one life to live, and the attitude was: ‘I can’t wait until it’s over, so I can get to heaven.’”

“I started thinking, kind of subconsciously, not really consciously, about the detrimental effects that ‘small now’ attitude had on the world and almost everything, in a way I can see much more clearly as an adult,” she says. “If you feel like life is all about suffering, and then after death is when you get to be in heaven, that permeates all of your actions. It permeates the attitudes that we take towards the planet, to other animals, and species: ‘All of this is just temporary anyways, so we don’t necessarily have to conserve it.’”

By high school, Eggert knew she no longer believed in Christianity. (She would eventually “come out” to her parents as an atheist in college). She started to focus more and more on the idea that, as she puts it, “the time we have is the only time we have.” She started reading philosophy and picked up a “not very serious” interest in Buddhism to explore the implications of that worldview: if we only have one life to live, what, then, does “time” mean? What does “eternity” mean?

Timelapse of “Eternity” (02010) by Alicia Eggert in collaboration with Mike Fleming. Every twelve hours, the hour and minute hands of thirty electric clocks spell the word ETERNITY.

In her last semester at Drexel University, where she was studying interior design, she discovered that conceptual art offered a gateway to explore these questions.

“All of a sudden, I understood that I could make art that was driven by an idea instead of an image,” she says. “And there are so many different ways you can bring an idea into existence, from just simply communicating it with text, to using all kinds of different sculptural materials, processes, and forms.”

While pursuing a Master in Fine Arts in sculpture at Alfred University, she began to merge her philosophical interest in time with her artistic practice.

“The Length of Now” (02008) by Alicia Eggert.

In an early piece from 02008 titled “The Length of Now,” Eggert soaked a yarn of red string in water and froze it into the shape of the word “now.” She then hung it on a wall and filmed it while it melted. (“Now,” in that artwork, turned out to be two minutes and forty-three seconds long).

“Coffee Cup Conveyor Belt Calendar” (02008) by Alicia Eggert.

“Coffee Cup Conveyor Belt Calendar” reimagined the daily ritual of having a cup of coffee on the way to work each morning as units of time, with each cup representing a day. The porcelain cups traveled slowly across a conveyor belt past post-it notes that read “Today,” “Tomorrow,” “The day after that,” “The day after that.” Every twenty-four hours, a cup fell off the end of the conveyor belt, shattering into a pile. Above the pile of shattered cups was a post-it note labeled “Yesterday.” Because the cups were made of unfired porcelain, the shards could be reconstituted into slip and remade into cups that started the cycle anew.

“That was the first time I ever made a kinetic sculpture that incorporated time and movement into the work,” Eggert says. “It was also the first time that I really started to think about cyclical versus linear time. That led me to start reading about time as it’s thought about in physics.”

“Between Now And Then” (02008) by Alicia Eggert.

Eggert considers “Between Now and Then” to be a breakthrough piece. It was her first experiment with signage, and could be found mounted on the wall of the hallway outside of her studio. On one side of the sign was the word “NOW.” On the other, the word “THEN.” Those who walked by could easily mistake it for a bathroom sign. Eggert saw it as “a blade that slices through a person’s path, dividing time and space.”

“That was when I really started to focus primarily on time with my work, and giving language a physical form,” Eggert says. “For a little while, I couldn’t figure out how those two things were related, but now that seems to be the combination of what I do primarily.”

A clock tells you what time it is. Eggert’s art asks you what time is. She doesn’t provide answers so much as present a constellation of possibilities.

Artworks by Alicia Eggert. From top left: “The Weight of Now” (02009); “Now” (02012); “Now… No, Now… No, No, No… Now” (02013); “You Are (On) An Island” (Made in collaboration with Mike Fleming, 02011–13); “On A Clear Day You Can See Forever” (02016–17); “NOW/HERE” (02018); “Forever Becoming” (02019); “The Future Comes From Behind Our Backs” (02020).

“I’m fascinated by all the different ways people think about time,” she says. “Some say it exists. Some say it doesn’t exist. Some say the present moment is all there is, others say discrete moments all stack up like the individual pages of a book, and that’s why we have this illusion that time is linear. There’s no way to prove that any of these ways of thinking about time is actually right. There’s probably little bits and pieces from all the different explanations that maybe form an answer. I don’t know. I just want to know as many of the explanations people have thought of as possible.”

In 02015, she came across a way of thinking about time that deeply resonated with her. It would inspire two artworks, including a light sculpture, “This Present Moment,” that was recently acquired by the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, the premier museum of American craft and decorative arts.

It was called the Long Now.

III. The Long Now

In01999, Gary Snyder, the Zen poet, sent an epigram to Stewart Brand, the environmentalist and cyberculture pioneer best known for founding and editing the Whole Earth Catalog:

This present moment

That lives on to become

Long ago.

Snyder’s poem alluded to how the present becomes past. Brand responded with a riff of his own, on how the future becomes present:

This present moment

Used to be

The unimaginable future.

At the time, Brand was at work completing The Clock of the Long Now, a book of essays that introduced readers to the ideas behind the 10,000 Year Clock and The Long Now Foundation, the nonprofit organization he co-founded with Brian Eno and Danny Hillis in 01996.

The book was a clarion call for engaging in long-term thinking and taking long-term responsibility to counterbalance civilization’s “pathologically short attention span.” Brand argued that by enlarging our sense of “now” to include both the last 10,000 years (“the size of civilization thus far”) and the next 10,000 years, humanity could transcend short-term thinking and engage the challenges of the present moment with the long view in mind. This 20,000-year frame of reference is known as the Long Now, a term coined by Brian Eno.

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Brand included his exchange with Snyder as the book’s closer. (Snyder would ultimately include his contribution in a 02016 collection of poetry, This Present Moment).

Brand’s epigram became one of the most shared selections from a book full of “quotable quotes,” regularly appearing in motivational tweets and the slides of keynote presentations. He always makes a point of crediting Snyder when the quote is attributed to him alone. I asked Brand recently whether this was simply a matter of giving credit where credit was due, or if he felt there was a deeper connection between the two poems that was lost when viewed in isolation. (Another famous Brand quip, “Information wants to be free,” is often shared without the crucial second part: “Information also wants to be expensive.”)

“Both credit and connection help the quote,” Brand told me. “Gary lends gravitas with the credit. Also it’s a sequence, which he started. The two riffs book-end time, backward and forward, the way Long Now tries to.”

“It’s a conversation,” Brand said. “Nearly all art is, not always so overtly.”

In 02018, Eggert added her voice to the conversation. She’d read The Clock of The Long Now three years earlier, and found the concept of the Long Now a compelling corrective to the detrimental effects of the small now she saw in religion. She was particularly struck by Brand’s “This present moment…” epigram.

“I’m on a constant hunt for literature to read that will be another star in that constellation of my understanding of time,” she says. “My process as an artist is, as I’m reading these books, I always keep a sketchbook nearby. If there’s ever a quote that jumps out at me, I write it down. Then, when I’m brainstorming for new work for an exhibition, I’ll oftentimes go back through my notebooks and look at all the quotes that I’ve written down. I don’t know how or why I ended up choosing Brand’s words at that particular time, but I started realizing that they were saying exactly what I was feeling at that moment to be true or important.”

When Eggert asked Brand on Twitter whether she could have permission to turn the quote into a neon sculpture, his response was typical: “Sure!” (The footer of Brand’s personal website reads: “Please don’t ask for permission to borrow my stuff: just do it”).

IV. This Present Moment

“This Present Moment,” which initially went on display at the Galeria Fernando Santos in Porto, Portugal in 02019 and will debut at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in 02022, is a neon pink sign that is twelve feet tall and fifteen feet wide. It cycles through two statements. First: “This present / moment / used to be / the unimaginable / future.” Then, after a few seconds, the words “present” and “unimaginable” blink off, leaving: “This / moment / used to be / the / future.” And then the sign turns off. After a beat, the cycle repeats.

“This Present Moment” is more than Brand’s epigram rendered as a sign. By adding the element of time to how viewers experience the message, Eggert has made Brand’s words immediate, dynamic and personal.

[image error]“This Present Moment” (02019) by Alicia Eggert.

At first glance, the piece conveys a deceptively simple truth: from the perspective of the past, this moment — as in, right now, as you read my words, and take in an animation of that sign — was once the future. But as time passes, questions arise: how long is a moment? Is it the interval between the sign turning off, and turning back on again? When does “now” end? When does “the future” begin?

It all depends, of course, on your perspective. The future might be ten seconds from now if that’s when your next meeting starts; next quarter, if you’re a businessperson; next election, if you’re a politician; an illusion, if you’re a Buddhist. Your sense of now might be impossibly brief, if you’re stressed, or apparently endless, if you’re mindful. It all depends on what you’re willing to consider, and what you’re willing to pay attention to.

The longer you pay attention to “This Present Moment,” the more meaningful it becomes.

“You could obviously zoom in on this present moment as being right now,” Eggert tells me. “Or you could zoom out on this present moment as being much longer. The way the sign flashes is a reminder of both of those things. When it turns off completely for a couple of seconds, and then starts to cycle back through, you’re reminded of that really short now. But the actual words suggest a much longer now as well.”

Perhaps, staring at that sign, you begin to realize that these two statements about time are always true for any human being who contemplates them. They were true for your ancestors. What was their present moment like? They’ll be true for your descendants. What unimaginable future awaits them?

“In our everyday lives, we’re inclined to think in short terms and see the present moment as small and narrow,” Eggert says. “But the same laws of nature that formed the rocks beneath our feet millions of years in the past are still in effect and in progress right now. And it seems as though our collective future might depend on our capacity to conceive of a ‘present moment’ that is much longer and wider — one that our limited field of view cannot contain.”

Such mental time travel is an exercise in empathy. The power of “This Present Moment,” like so much of Eggert’s artwork, is that it’s simple enough, and accessible enough, to make that exercise feel as intuitive as looking at a clock to check the time.

V. The Unimaginable Future

Eggert’s solo exhibition, “Conditions of Possibility,” opened at the Liliana Bloch Gallery in Dallas, Texas, in April 02021. A majority of the gallery space is occupied by her latest artwork, “The Unimaginable Future.”

“The Unimaginable Future” (02020–21) by Alicia Eggert. The work is inspired by The Long Now Foundation and Stewart Brand’s The Clock of the Long Now. Photograph by Kevin Todora.

A companion piece to “This Present Moment,” “The Unimaginable Future” consists of six layers of steel rebar with the word “FUTURE” occupying the negative space. Mounted on a nearby wall are three small kinetic structures that use clock hands to spell the word “NOW” at different speeds. The Long Now (represented by the steel “Future” sculpture) and the Short Now (represented by the three kinetic “Now” sculptures) coexist in the same moment.

“Small Nows” (02020–02021) by Alicia Eggert. Photograph by Kevin Todora.

The exhibition reflects Eggert’s conviction that when we engage with art that explores language and time — what she calls “the powerful but invisible forces that shape our reality” — we might wonder not only about what is real, but what is possible.

“All That is Possible is Real” (02016–17) by Alicia Eggert. The text comes from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

“Art provides us with opportunities to think deeply and meaningfully about what we value as individuals and as a society,” Eggert says. “Art gives us new ways of telling the same stories — ways that are continually more compelling, more emotive, more relatable and more experiential. Those experiences create new ways of understanding the world and the role we play in it. Art is a condition of possibility for imagining otherwise unimaginable futures.”

The Sagrada Familia under construction in Barcelona, Spain. Photo by Angela Compagnone on Unsplash.

In a May 02021 Long Now talk, Sean Carroll, a physicist whose writings on time have strongly influenced Eggert’s work, spoke about how this capacity to imagine unimaginable futures is what makes human life meaningful.

As an example, he pointed to Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia, a modernist cathedral designed by Antoni Gaudi. Construction began in 01883, and Gaudi harbored no illusions that it would be completed by the time of his death, which occurred in 01926. It remains under construction to this day.

“The point is not that Gaudi thought that he would be a ghostly persistence over time that would be looking down on the cathedral and admiring it,” Carroll said. “He gained pleasure right at that moment from the prospect of the future. And that’s something that we humans have the ability to do. The conditions of our selves, right now, depend on our visions of the past and the future, as well as our conditions here in the present.”

Carroll went on to say:

We are temporary little bits of complex structure in the universe that are part of the overall increase of entropy over time. That means we are ephemeral. We’re not going to last forever. That’s the bad news. We’re not going to last for 10 to the 10 to the 10 years. We have a lifespan. We have an expiration date. But it also means we are interesting. We are the interesting part of the universe. Part of this complexity is our ability to think about and model ourselves and the rest of the universe to do what psychologists call mental time travel, to imagine ourselves not just in different places, but at different times. It’s that ability, that imagination, that flow through time, that makes us what we are as human beings.

It is all too easy to forget that we have this capacity to imagine unimaginable futures. It is all too easy to forget that time can mean more than the narrow concerns of the here-and-now or the hoped-for salvation of a timeless eternal then.

The art of Alicia Eggert helps us remember.

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Play inspired by Long Now premieres this month

Gutter Street, a London-based theatre company, is premiering a play called The Long Now later this month. “The Long Now is inspired by the work of the @longnow foundation and takes a look at the need to promote long term thinking through our unique Gutter Street Lens,” the company said on Twitter.

Play summary:

Tudor is the finest clockmaker of all time. She knows her cogs from her clogs but will she be able to finish fixing her town’s ancient clock before time runs out? She is distracted by the beast that twists her dreams into nightmares and the wonder of the outside world. In search for the right tools in her trusty pile of things, will she finally finish the job she started…or will she just have another cup of tea?

More info and tickets here.

Stewart Brand and Brian Eno on “We Are As Gods”

In March 02021, We Are As Gods, the documentary about Long Now co-founder Stewart Brand, premiered at SXSW. As part of the premiere, the documentary’s directors, David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg, hosted a conversation between Brand and fellow Long Now co-founder Brian Eno. (Eno scored the film, contributing 24 original tracks to the soundtrack.) The full conversation can be watched above. A transcript follows below.  

David Alvarado: Hi. My name is David Alvarado. I’m one of the directors for a new documentary film called We Are as Gods. This is a documentary feature that explores the extraordinary life of a radical thinker, environmentalist, and controversial technologist, Stewart Brand. This is a story that marries psychedelia, counterculture, futurism. It’s an unexpected journey of a complicated American polymath at the vanguard of our culture.

Today, we’re having a conversation with the subject of the film himself, Stewart Brand, and Brian Eno.

Jason Sussberg: Okay. In the unlikely event that you don’t know either of our two speakers, allow me to introduce them. First off, we have Brian Eno, who’s a musician, a producer, a visual artist and an activist. He is the founding member of the Long Now Foundation, along with Stewart Brand. He’s a musician of multiple albums, solo and collaborative. His latest album is called Film Music 1976-2020, which was released a few months ago, and we are lucky bastards because it includes a song from our film, We Are as Gods, called “A Reasonable Question.”

Stewart Brand, he is the subject of our documentary. Somewhere, long ago, I read a description of Stewart saying that he was “a finder and a founder,” which I think is a really apt way to talk about him. He finds tools, peoples, and ideas, and blends them together. He founded or co-founded Revive and Restore, The Long Now Foundation, The WELL, Global Business Network, and the Whole Earth Catalog and all of its offshoots. He is an author of multiple books, and he’s currently working on a new book called Maintenance. He’s a trained ecologist at Stanford and served as an infantry officer in the Army. I will let Stewart and Brian take it from here.

Stewart Brand: Brian, what a pleasure to be talking to you. I just love this.

Brian Eno: Yes.

Stewart Brand: You and I go back a long way. I was a fan before I was a friend, and so I continue to be a fan. I’m a fan of the music that you added to this film. I’m curious about particularly the one that is in your new album, Film Music. What’s it called…”[A] Reasonable Question.” Tell me what you remember about that piece, and I want to ask the makers of the film here what it was like from their end.

Jason Sussberg: We can play it for our audience now.

David Alvarado: You originally titled it “Why Does Music Like This Exist?”

Brian Eno: The reason it had that original title, “Why Does Music Like This Even Exist?”, was because it was one of those nights when I was in a mood of complete desperation, and thinking, “What am I doing? Is it of any use whatsoever?” I’ve learned to completely distrust my moods when I’m working on music. I could think something is fantastic, and then realize a few months later that it’s terrible, and vice versa. So what I do is I routinely mix everything that I ever work on, because I just don’t trust my judgment at the moment of working on it. That piece, the desperation I felt about it is reflected in the original title, “Why Does Music Like This Even Exist?” I was thinking, “God, this is so uninteresting. I’ve done this kind of thing a thousand times before.”

In fact, it was only when we started looking for pieces for this film…the way I look for things is just by putting my archive on random shuffle, and then doing the cleaning or washing up or tidying up books or things like that. So I just hear pieces appear. I often don’t remember them at first. I don’t remember when I did them. Anyway, this piece came up. I thought, “Oh. That’s quite a good piece.”

David Alvarado: I mean, that’s so brilliant because it’s actually… We weren’t involved, obviously, in choosing what music tracks you wanted to use for your 1976 to 2020 film album, and so you chose that one, the very one that you weren’t liking at the beginning. That’s just incredible.

Brian Eno: Yes. Well, this has happened now so many times that I think one’s judgment at the time of working has very little to do with the quality of what you’re making. It’s just to do with your mood at that moment.

Stewart Brand: So in this case, Brian, that piece is kind of joyous and exciting to hear. These guys put it in a part of the film where I’m at my best, I’m actually part of a real frontier happening. This must be a first for you, in a sense, you’re not only scoring the film, you’re in the film. This piece of film, I now realize as we listened to it, then cuts into you talking about me, but not about the music. You had no idea when they were interviewing you it was going to be overlaid on this. I sort of have to applaud these guys for not getting cute there and drowning you out with your own music there or something. “Yeah, well, he is chatting on, but let’s listen to the music.” But nevertheless, it really works in there. Do you like how it worked out in the film?

Brian Eno: Yes. Yes, I do. I like that, and quite a few of the other pieces appeared probably in places that I wouldn’t have imagined putting them, actually. This, I think, is one of the exciting things about doing film music, that you hear the music differently when you see it placed in a context. Just like music can modify a film, the film can modify the music as well. So sometimes you see the music and you think, “Oh, yes. They’ve spotted a feeling in that that I didn’t, or I hadn’t articulated anyway, I wasn’t aware of, perhaps.”

Stewart Brand: You’ve done a lot of, and the album shows it, you’ve done a lot of music for film. Are there sort of rules in your mind of how you do that? It’s different than ambient music, I guess, but there must be sort of criteria of, “Oh yeah, this is for a film, therefore X.” Are there things that you don’t do in film music?

Brian Eno: Yes. I’ll tell you what the relationship is with ambient music. Both ambient music and most of the film music I make deliberately leaves a space where somebody else might fill that space in with a lead instrument or something that is telling a story, something narrative, if you like. Even if it’s instrumental, it can still be narrative in the sense that you get the idea that this thing is the central element, which is having the adventure, and the rest is a sort of support structure to that or a landscape for that.

So what I realized, one of the things I liked about film music was that you very often just got landscape, which wasn’t populated, because the film is meant to be the thing that populates the landscape, if you like. I started listening to film music probably in the late ’60s, and it was Italian, like Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone and those kinds of people, who were writing very, very atmospheric music, which sort of lacked a central presence. I like that hole that was left, because I found the hole very inviting. It kind of says, “Come on, you be the adventurer. You, the listener, you’re in this landscape, what’s happening to you?” It’s a deliberate incompleteness, in a way, or an unfinishedness that that music has. I think that was part of the idea of ambient music as well, to try to make something that didn’t try to fix your attention, to hold it and keep it in one place, that deliberately allowed it to wander around and have a look around. So this happens to be a good formula for film music.

I really started making film music in a strange way. I used to, when I was working on my early song albums, sometimes at the end of the day I’d have half an hour left and I’d have a track up on a multi-track tape, with all the different instruments, and I’d say to the engineer, “Let’s make the film music version now.” And what that normally meant was take out the main instruments, the voice, particularly the voice, and then other things that were sort of leading the piece. Take those all out, slow the tape down, often, to half speed, and see what we can do with what’s left. Actually, I often found those parts of the day more exciting than the rest of the day, when suddenly something came into existence that nobody had ever thought about before. That was sort of how I started making film music.

So I had collected up a lot of pieces like that, and I thought, “Do you know what, I should send these to film directors. They might find a use for these.” And indeed they did. So that’s how it started, really.

Stewart Brand: So you initiated that, the filmmakers did not come to you.

Brian Eno: No. I had been approached only once before. Actually, before I ever made any albums I’d been approached by a filmmaker to do a piece of music for him, but other than that, no, I didn’t have any approaches. I sort of got the ball rolling by saying, “Look, I’m doing this kind of music, and I think it would be good for films.” So I released an album which was called Music for Films, though in fact none of the music had been in films. It was a sort of proposal: this is music that could be in films. I just left out the could be.

Stewart Brand: You are a very good marketer of your product, I must say. That’s just neat. So from graphic designers, the idea of figure-ground, and sometimes they flip and things like that, that’s all very interesting. It sounds like in a way this is music which is all ground, but invites a figure.

Brian Eno: Yes, yes.

Stewart Brand: You’re a graphic artist originally, is that right?

Brian Eno: Well, I was trained as a fine artist, actually. I was trained as a painter. Well, when I say I was trained, I went to an art school which claimed it was teaching a fine art course, so I did painting and sculpture. But actually I did as much music there as I did visual art as well.

Stewart Brand: So it’s an art school, and you were doing music. Were other people in that school doing music at that time, or is that unique to you?

Brian Eno: No, that was in the ’60s. The art schools were the crucible of a lot of what happened in pop music at that time. And funnily enough, also the art schools were where experimental composers would find an audience. The music schools were absolutely uninterested in them. Music schools were very, very academic at that time. People had just started, I was one of the pioneers of this, I suppose, had just started making music in studios. So instead of sitting down with a guitar and writing something and then going into the studio to record it, people like me were going into studios to make something using the possibilities of that place, something that you couldn’t have made otherwise. You wouldn’t come up with a guitar or a piano. A sort of whole new era of music came out of that, really. But it really came out of this possibility of multi-track recording.

Stewart Brand: So this is pre-digital? You’re basically working with the tapes and mixing tapes, or what?

Brian Eno: This was late ’60s, early ’70s. What had happened was that until about 01968, the maximum number of tracks you had was four tracks. I think people went four-track in 01968. I think the last Beatles album was done on four track, which was considered incredibly luxurious. What that meant, four tracks, was that you could do something on one track, something on another, mix them down to one track so you still got one track and then three others left, then you could kind of build things up slowly and carefully.

Over time, so, it meant something different musically, because it separated music from performance. It made music much more like painting, in that you could add something one day and take it off the next day, add something else. The act of making music extended in time like the act of painting does. You didn’t have to just walk in front of the canvas and do it all in one go, which was how music had previously been recorded. That meant that recording studios were something that painting students immediately understood, because they understood that process. But music students didn’t. They still thought it had to be about performance. In fact, there was a lot of resistance from musicians in general, because they thought that it was cheating, it wasn’t fair you were doing these things. You couldn’t actually play them. Of course, I thought, “Well, who cares? It doesn’t really matter, does it? What matters is what comes out at the end.”

Stewart Brand: Well, I was doing a little bit of music, well, sort of background stuff or putting together things for art installations at that time, and what I well remember is fucking razor blade, where you’re cutting the tape and splicing it, doing all these things. It was pretty raw. But of course, the film guys are going through the same stuff at that time. They were with their razor blade equivalents, cutting and splicing and whatnotting. So digital has just exploded the range of possibilities, which I think I’ve heard some of your theory that exploded them too far, and you’re always looking for ways to restrain your possibilities when you’re composing. Is that right?

Brian Eno: Yes. Well, I suppose it’s a problem that everybody has now, when you think about it. Now, we’re all faced with a whole universe of rabbit holes that we could spend our time disappearing down. So you have to permanently be a curator, don’t you think? You have to be always thinking, “Okay. There’s a million interesting things out there, but I’d like to get something done, so how am I going to reduce that variety and choose a path to follow?”

Stewart Brand: How much of that process is intention and how much is discovery?

Brian Eno: I think the thing that decides that is whether you’ve got a deadline or not. The most important element in my working life, a lot of the time, is a deadline. The reason it’s important… Well, I’m sure as a writer you probably appreciate deadlines as well. It makes you realize you’ve got to stop pissing around. You have to finally decide on something. So the archive of music that I have now, which is to say after those days of fiddling around like I’ve described with that piece, I’d make a rough mix, they go into the archive — I’ve got 6,790 pieces in the archive now, I noticed today. They’re nearly all unfinished. They’re sort of provocative beginnings. They’re interesting openings. When I get a job like the job of doing this film music, I think, “Okay. I need some music.” So I naturally go to the archive and see what I’ve already started which might be possible to finish as the piece for this film, for example.

So whether I finish something or not completely depends really on whether it has a destination and a deadline. If it’s got a destination, that really helps, because I think, “Okay. It’s not going to be something like that. It’s not going to be that.” It just clears a lot of those possibilities which are amplifying every day. They’re multiplying every day, these possibilities. 

Stewart Brand: One thing that surprised me about your work on this film, is I thought you would have just handed them a handful of cool things and they would then turn it into the right background at the right place from their standpoint. But it sounds like there was interaction, Jason and David, between you and Brian on some of these cuts. What do you want to say about that?

Jason Sussberg: Yeah. I mean, we had an amazing selection of great tracks to plug in and see if they could help amplify the scene visually by giving it a sonic landscape that we could work with. Then, our initial thinking was that’s how we were going to work. But then we ended up going back to you, Brian, and asking for perhaps a different track or a different tone. And then you ended up, actually, making entirely new original music, to our great delight. So one day when we woke up and we had in our inbox original music that you scored specifically for scenes, that was a great delight. We were able to have a back and forth.

Brian Eno: Yes, that’s-

Stewart Brand: Were you giving him visual scenes or just descriptions?

Jason Sussberg: Right. Actually, what we did was we pulled together descriptions of the scenes and then we had… You just wanted, Brian, just a handful of photographs to kind of grok what we were doing. I don’t think you… Maybe you could talk about why you didn’t want the actual scene, but you had a handful of stills and a description of what we were going for tonally, and then you took it from there. What we got back was both surprising and made perfect sense every time.

Brian Eno: I remember one piece in particular that I made in relation to a description and some photographs, which was called, when I made it, it was called “Brand Ostinato.” I don’t know what it became. You’d have to look up your notes to see what title it finally took. But that piece, I was very pleased with. I wanted something that was really dynamic and fresh and bracing, made you sort of stand up. So I was pleased with that one.

But I usually don’t want to see too much of the film, because one of the things I think that music can do is to not just enhance what is already there in the film, which is what most American soundtrack writing is about… Most Hollywood writing is about underlining, about saying, “Oh, this is a sad scene. We’ll make it a little sadder with some music.” Or, “This is an action scene. We’ll give it a little bit more action.” As if the audience is a bit stupid and has to be told, “This is a sad scene. You’re supposed to feel a bit weepy now.” Whereas I thought the other day, what I like better than underlining is undermining. I like this idea of making something that isn’t really quite in the film. It’s a flavor or a taste that you can point to, and people say, “Oh, yes. There’s something different going on there.”

I mean, it would be very easy with Stewart to make music that was kind of epic and, I don’t know, Western or American or Californian or something like that. There are some obvious things you could do. If you were that kind of composer, you’d carefully study Stewart and you’d find things that were Stewart-ish in music and make them. But I thought, “No. What is exciting about this is the shock of the new kind of feeling.” That piece, that particular piece, “Brand Ostinato,” has that feeling, I think, of something that is very strikingly upright and disciplined. This discipline, that’s I think the feeling of it that I like. I don’t think, in that particular part in the film, where that occurs, I don’t think that’s a scene where you would see discipline, unless somebody had suggested it to you by way of a piece of music, for example.

Stewart Brand: And Jason, did you in fact use that piece of music with that part of the film?

Jason Sussberg: Yeah, I don’t think it was exactly where Brian had intended to put it, but hearing the description, what we did was we put that song in a scene where you are going to George Church’s lab, Stewart, and we’re trying to build up George Church as this genius geneticist. So the song was actually, curiously, written about Stewart and Stewart’s character of discipline, but we apply it to another character in the film. However, what you were going for, which is this upright, adventurous, Western spirit, I think is embodied by the work of the Church Lab to de-extinct animals. So it has that same bravado and gusto that you intended, it was just we kind of… And maybe this is what you were referring to about undermining and underlining, I feel like we kind of undermined your original intention and applied it to a different character, and that dialectic was working. Of course, Stewart is in that scene, but I think that song, that track really amplifies the mood that we were going for, which is the end of the first act.

Brian Eno: Usually, when people do music that is about cutting edge science, it’s all very drifty and cosmic. It’s all kind of, “Wow, it’s so weird,” kind of thing. I really wanted to say science is about discipline, actually. It’s about doing things well and doing things right. It’s not hippie-trippy. Of course, you can feel that way about it once it’s done, but I don’t think you do it that way. So I didn’t want to go the trippy route.

David Alvarado: Yeah. We loved it. It still is the anthem of the film for us. I mean, you named it as such, but it just really feels like it embodies Stewart’s quest on all his amazing adventures he’s been on. So that’s fantastic.

Brian Eno: One of the things that is actually really touching about this film is the early life stuff, which of course I never knew anything about. As women always say, “Well, men never ask that sort of question, do they?” And in fact, in my case it’s completely true. I never bothered to ask people how they got going or that kind of autobiographical question. But what strikes me, first of all, your father was quite an important part of the story. I got the feeling that quite a lot of the character that is described in there is attributed to your father has come right through to you as well, this respect for tools and for making things, which is different from the intellectual respect for thinking about things. Often intellectuals respect other thinkers, but they don’t often respect makers in the same way. So, I wonder when you started to become aware that there could be an overlap between those two things, that there was a you that was a making you and there was a thinking you as well? I wonder if there was a point where those two sort of came together for you, in your early life.

Stewart Brand: Well, you’re pointing out something that I hadn’t really noticed as well, frankly, until the film, which is what I remember is that my father was sort of ground and my mother was figure. She was the big event. She got me completely buried in books and thinking, and she was a liberal. I never did learn what my father’s politics were, but they’re probably pretty conservative. He tried to teach me to fish and he was a really desperately awful teacher. He once taught a class of potential MIT students, he failed every one of them. My older brother Mike said, “Why did you do that?” And he said, “Well, they just did not learn the material. They didn’t make it.” And my brother actually said, “You don’t think that says anything about you as their teacher?”

So I kind of discounted —  as I’m making youthful, stupid judgments — him. I think what you pointed out is a very good one. He was trained as a civil engineer at MIT. Another older brother, Pete, went to MIT. I later completely got embedded at MIT at The Media Lab and Negroponte and all of that. In a way I feel more identified with MIT than I do with Stanford where I did graduate. In Stanford I took as many humanities as I could with a science major.

But I think it’s also something that happened with the ’60s, Brian, which is that what we were dropping out of — late beatniks, early hippies, which is my generation — was a construct that universities were imparting, and I imagine British universities have a slightly different version of this than American ones, but still, the Ivy League-type ones. I remember one of the eventual sayings of the hippies was “back to basics,” which we translated as “back to the land,” which turned out to be a mistake, but the back to basics part was pretty good. We had this idea, we were immediately followed by the baby boom. It was the bulge in the snake, the pig in the python. There were so many of us that the world was always asking us our opinion of things, which we wind up taking for granted. You could, as a young person, you could just call a press conference. “I’m a young person. I want to expound some ideas.” And they would show up and write it all seriously down. The Beatles ran into this. It was just hysterical. Pretty soon you start having opinions. 

We were getting Volkswagen Bugs and vans. This is in my mind now because I’m working on this book about maintenance. We were learning how to fix our own cars. Partly it was the either having no money or pretending to have no money, which, by the way, that was me. It turned out I actually had a fair amount, I just ignored it, that my parents had invested in my name. We were eating out of and exploring and finding amazing things basically in garbage cans and debris boxes. Learning how to cook and eat roadkill and make clothing and domes and all these things. This was something that Peter Drucker noticed about that generation, that they were the first set of creatives that took not just art but also in a sense craft and just stuff seriously, and learned… Mostly we were making mistakes with the stuff, but then you either just backed away from it or you learned how to do it decently after all and become a great guitar maker or whatever it might be. That was what the Whole Earth Catalog tapped into, was that desire to not just make your own life, but make your own world.

Brian Eno: I’m trying to think… In my own life, I can remember some games I played as kids that I made up myself. I realized that they were really the first creative things that I ever did. I invented these games. I won’t bother to explain them, they were pretty simple, but I can remember the excitement of having thought of it myself, and thinking, “I made this. I made this idea myself.” I was sort of intrigued by it. I just wondered if there was a moment in your life when you had that feeling of, “This is the pleasure of thinking, the pleasure of coming up with something that didn’t exist before”?

Stewart Brand: There was one and it’s very well expressed in the film, which was the Trips Festival in January 01966. That was the first time that I took charge over something. I’d been going along with Ken Kesey and the Pranksters. I’d been going along with various creative people, USCO, a group of artists on the East Coast, and contributing but not leading. Once I heard from one of the Pranksters, Mike Hagen, that they wanted to do a thing that would be a Trips Festival, kind of an acid test for the whole Bay Area. I knew that they could not pull that off, but that it should happen. I picked up the phone and I started making arrangements for this public event.

And it worked out great. We were lucky in all the ways that you can be lucky in, and not unlucky in any of the ways you can be unlucky. It was a coup. It was a lot of being a tour de force, not by me, but by basically the Bay Area creatives getting together in one place and changing each other and the world. That was the point for me that I had really given myself agency to drive things.

There’s other things that give you reality in the world. Also in the film is when I appeared on the Dick Cavett Show.

Brian Eno: Oh, yes.

Stewart Brand: Which was a strange event for all of us. But the effect it had in my family was that… My father was dead by then, but my mother had always been sort of treating me as the youngest child, needing help. She would send money from time to time, keep me going in North Beach. But once I was on Dick Cavett, which she regularly watched, I had grown up in her eyes. I was now an adult. I should be treated as a peer.

Brian Eno: So no more money.

Stewart Brand: Well… yeah, yeah. Did that ever happen? I think she sort of liked occasionally keeping a token of dependency going. She was very generous with the money.

The great thing of being a hippie is you didn’t need much. I was not an expensive dependent. That was, I think, another thing there that the hippies weren’t, and that makes us freer about being wealthy or not, is that we’ve had perfectly good lives without much money at all. So the money is kind of an interesting new thing that you can get fucked up by or do creatively or just ignore. But you have those choices in a way, I think, that people who are either born to money or who are getting rich young don’t have. They have other interesting situations to deal with. For us, the discipline was not enough money, and for some of them the discipline is too much money, and how do you keep that from killing you.

Brian Eno: Yes. Yeah. I’ll ask the filmmakers a question as well, if I may. It’s a very simple question, but it isn’t actually answered in the film. The question is: why Stewart? Why did you choose to make a film about him? There are so many interesting people in North America, let alone in the West Coast, but what drew you to him in particular?

Jason Sussberg: I’ll answer this, and then I’ll let you take a swipe at this, David. I mean, I’ve always looked up to Stewart from the time that I ran into an old Whole Earth Catalog. It was the Last Whole Earth Catalog, when I was 18 years old, going to college in the year 02000. So this was 25 years after it was written. I sort of dove into it head first and realized this strange artifact from the past actually was a representation of possibilities, a representation of the future. So after that moment, I read a book of Stewart’s that just came out, about the Clock of the Long Now, and after that… I’ve always been an environmentalist and Earth consciousness and trying to think about how to preserve the natural world, but also I believe in technology as a hopeful future that we can have. We can use tools to create a more sustainable world. So Stewart was able to blend these two ideas in a way that seemed uncontroversial, and it really resonated with me as a fan of science and technology and the natural world. So Stewart, pretty much from an early age, was someone I always looked up to.

When David and I went to grad school, we were talking about the problems of the environmental movement, and Stewart was at the time writing a book that would basically later articulate these ideas.

Brian Eno: Oh, yes, good.

Jason Sussberg: And so when that book came out, it was like it just put our foot on the pedals, like, “Wow, we should make a movie of Stewart and his perspective.” But yeah, I was just always a fan of his.

Brian Eno: So that was quite a long time ago, then.

Jason Sussberg: Yeah, 10 years-

Brian Eno: Is that when you started thinking about it?

Jason Sussberg: Yeah, absolutely. I had made a short film of a friend of probably yours, Brian, and of Stewart’s, Lloyd Kahn. It was a short little eight-minute documentary about Lloyd Kahn and how he thought of shelter and of home construction. That was after that moment that I thought, “This is a really rich territory to explore.” I think that actually was 02008, so at that moment I already had the inkling of, wow, this would be a fantastic biographical documentary that nobody had made.

Stewart Brand: I’m curious, what’s David’s interest?

David Alvarado: Yeah, well, I think Jason and I are drawn to complicated stories, and my god, Stewart. There was a moment in college when I almost stopped becoming a filmmaker and wanted to become a geologist. I just was so fascinated by the complexity of looking at the land, being able to read the stratigraphy, for example, of a cliff and understand deep history of how that relates to what the land looks like now. So, I of course came back into film, but I see a lot of that there in your life. I mean, the layers of what you’ve done… The top layer for us is the de-extinction, the idea of resurrecting extinct species to reset ecosystems and repair damage that humans have caused. That could be its own subject, and if it’s all you did, that would be fascinating. But sitting right underneath that sits all these amazing things all the way back to the ’60s. So I think it’s just like my path as an artist to just dig through layers and, oh boy, your life was just full of it. It was a pleasure to be able to do that with you, so thank you for sharing your life with us.

Stewart Brand: Well, thank you for packaging my life for me. As Kevin Kelly says, the movie that you put out is sort of a trailer for the whole body of stuff that you’ve got. But by going through that process with you, and for example digitizing all of my tens of thousands of photographs, and then the interviews and the shooting in various places and having the adventure in Siberia and whatnot, but… When you get to the late 70s, Brian, and if you try to think of your life as an arc or a passage or story or a whole of any kind, it’s actually quite hard, because you’ve got these various telescopic views back to certain points, but they don’t link up. You don’t understand where you’ve been very well. It’s always a mishmash. With John Markoff also doing a book version of my life, it’s actually quite freeing for me to have that done. And Brian, this is where I wish Hermione Lee would do your biography. She would do you a great favor by just, “Here is everything you’ve done, and here is what it all means. My goodness, it’s quite interesting.” And then you don’t have to do that.

Brian Eno: Yeah, I’d be so grateful if she would do that, or if anybody would do that, yes.

Stewart Brand: It’s a real gift in that it’s also a really well done work of art. It has been just delightful for me. I think one of the things, Brian, it’ll be interesting to see which you see in this when you see the film more than once, or maybe you’ve already done so, is you’ve made a great expense of your time and effort, a re-watchable film. And Brian, the music is a big part of this. The music is blended in so much in a landscapy way, that except for a couple of places where it comes to the fore, like when I’m out in the canoe on Higgins Lake and you’re singing away, that it takes a re-listen, a re-viewing of the film to really start to get what the music is doing.

And then, you guys had such a wealth of material, both of my father’s amazing filmmaking and then from the wealth of photography I did, and then the wealth of stuff you found as archivists, I mean, the number of cuts in this film must be some kind of a record for a documentary, the number of images that go blasting by. So, instead of a gallery of photographs, it’s basically a gallery of contact sheets where you’re not looking at the shot I made of so-and-so, you’ve got all 10 of them, but sort of blinked together. That rewards re-viewing, because there’s a lot of stuff where things go by and you go, “Wait, what was that? Oh, no, there’s a new thing. Oh, what was that one? That one’s gone too.” They’re adding up. It’s a nice accumulative kind of drenching of the viewer in things that really rewards…

It’s one of the reasons that I think it’s actually going to do well on people’s video screenings, because they can stop it and go, “Wait a minute. What just happened?” And go back a couple of frames. Whereas in the theater, this is going to go blasting on by. Anyway, that’s my view, that this has been enjoyable to revisit.

Brian Eno: When you first watched… Well, I don’t know at which stage you first started watching what David and Jason had been doing, but were there any kind of nasty surprises, any places where you thought, “Oh god, I wish they hadn’t found that bit of film”?

David Alvarado: That’s a great question. Yeah.

Stewart Brand: Brian, the deal I sort of made with myself and with these guys, and that I made the same one with [John] Markoff, is it’s really their product. I’m delighted to be the raw material, but I won’t make any judgments about their judgments. When I think something is wrong, a photograph that depicts somebody that turns out not to be actually that person, I would speak up and I did do that. I’ve done much more of that sort of thing with Markoff in the book. But whenever there’s interpretation, that’s not my job. I have to flip into it, and it’s easy to be, when you both care about your life and you don’t care about your life, you would have this attitude too, of Brian Eno, yawn, been there done that, got sent a fucking T-shirt. So finding a way to not be bored about one’s life is actually kind of interesting, and that’s seeing through this refraction in a funhouse mirror, in a kaleidoscope of other people’s read, that makes it actually sort of enjoyable to engage.

Brian Eno: Yes. I think one of the things that’s interesting when you watch somebody else’s take on your life, somebody writes a biography of you or recants back to you a period that you lived through, is it makes you aware of how much you constructed the story that you hold yourself. You’ve got this kind of narrative, then I did this and then of course that led to that, and then I did that… And it all sort of makes sense when you tell the story, but when somebody else tells the story, it’s just like I was saying about conspiracy theories, to think that they can come up with a completely different story, and it’s actually equally plausible, and sometimes, frighteningly, even more plausible than the one you’ve been telling yourself.

Stewart Brand: Well, it gets stronger than that, because these are people who’ve done the research. So an example from the film is these guys really went through all my father’s film. There’s stuff in there I didn’t know about. There’s an incredibly sweet photograph of my young mother, my mother being young, and basically cradling the infant, me, and canoodling with me. I’d never seen that before. So I get a blast of, “Oh, mom, how great, thank you,” that I wouldn’t have gotten if they hadn’t done this research.

And lots of times, especially for Markoff’s research…So, Doug Engelbart and The Mother of All Demos, I have a story I’ve been telling for years to myself and to the world of how I got involved in being a sort of filmmaker within that project. It turned out I had just completely forgotten that I’d actually studied Doug Engelbart before any of that, and I was going to put him in an event I was going to organize called the Education Fair, and the whole theory of his approach, very humanist approach to computers and the use of computers, computers basically blending in to human collaboration, was something I got very early. And I did the Trips Festival and he sort of thought I was a showman and then they brought me on as the adviser to the actual production. But the genesis of the event, I’d been telling this wrong story for years. There’s quite a lot of that. As you say, I think our own view of ourselves becomes fiction very quickly.

Brian Eno: Yes. Yes. It’s partly because one wants to see a kind of linear progression and a causality. One doesn’t really want to admit that there was a lot of randomness in it, that if you’d taken that turning on the street that day, life would have panned out completely differently. That’s so disorientating, that thought, that we don’t tolerate it for long. We sort of patch it up to make the story hold together.

Stewart Brand: That’s what you’ll get from the Tom Stoppard biography. Remember that his first serious, well, popular play was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and it starts with a flip of a coin. It turns out his own past of how he got from Singapore to India and things like that were just these kind of random war-related events that carved a path of chance, chance, chance, chance, that then informed his creative life for the rest of his life. There’s a book coming out from Daniel Kahneman called Noise, that Bachman and Kahneman and another guy have generated. It looks like it’s going to be fantastic. Basically, he’s going beyond Thinking Fast and Slow to…a whole lot of the data that science and our world and the mind deals with is this kind of randomized, stochastic noise, which we then interpret as signal. And it’s not. It’s hard to hold it in your mind, that randomness. It’s one of the things I appreciate from having studied evolution at an impressionable age, is that a lot of evolution is: randomness is not a bad thing that happens. Randomness is the most creative thing that happens.

Brian Eno: Yes. Well, we are born pattern recognizers. If we don’t find them, we’ll construct them. We take all the patterns that we recognize very seriously. We think that they are reality. But they aren’t necessarily exclusive. They’re not exclusive realities.

Jason Sussberg: All right. I hate to end it here. This discussion is really fascinating. We’re getting into some very heady philosophical ideas. But unfortunately, our time is short. So we have to bid both Stewart and Brian farewell. I encourage everybody to go watch the film We Are as Gods, if you haven’t already. Thank you so much for participating in this discussion.

David Alvarado: A special thanks to Stripe Press for helping making this film a reality. Thank you to you, the viewer, for watching, to Stewart for sharing your life, and Brian for this amazing original score.

Brian Eno: Good. Well, good luck with it. I hope it does very well.

Meet Ty Caudle, The Interval’s New Beverage Director

Long Now is pleased to announce that longtime Interval bartender Ty Caudle will become The Interval’s next Beverage Director. He takes the reins from Todd Carnam, who has moved to Washington, D.C. after a creative three-year run at the helm. 

“We are very excited and grateful to have Ty in such a strong position to make this transition both seamless and inspired,” says Alexander Rose, Long Now’s Executive Director and Founder of The Interval. 

Caudle’s bartending career began at a small backyard party in San Francisco. He was working as a caterer for the event, and when the bartender failed to show, he was thrust into the role despite having zero experience.

“We had no idea what we were doing,” he says, “but there was definitely an energy to bartending that wasn’t otherwise present in catering.”

After a friend gifted him a copy of Imbibe! by David Wondrich, Caudle knew he’d found his calling.

“The book opened up a world that I otherwise would’ve never known,” he says. “It traced the history of forgotten ingredients and techniques, painted a rich tapestry of the world of bartending in the 01800s, and most importantly taught me that tending bar was a legitimate profession, one to be studied and practiced.”

Ty Caudle at The Interval. 

And so he did. Caudle devoured every bartending book he could find, bought esoteric cocktail ingredients, and experimented at home. He visited distilleries in Kentucky, Tequila, Oaxaca, Ireland, and Copenhagen to learn more about how different cultures approached spirit production.

“Those trips cemented my deep respect for the craft and history of distillation,” he says. “Whether on a tropical hillside under a tin roof or in a cacophonous bustling factory, spirit production is one of humanity’s great achievements. As bartenders, we have a responsibility to honor those artisans’ tireless efforts with every martini or manhattan we stir.”

Breaking through in the industry during the Great Recession, however, proved challenging. Caudle eventually landed a gig prepping the bar at the now-shuttered Locanda in the Mission. This led to other bartending opportunities at a small handful of spaces in the same neighborhood as Locanda.

The Interval at Long Now.

The Interval opened its doors in 02014 with Jennifer Colliau as its Beverage Director. Colliau was something of a legend in the Bay Area’s vibrant bar scene, having founded Small Hand Foods after eight years tending bar at San Francisco’s celebrated Slanted Door restaurant.

Caudle was a big fan of Colliau’s work, and promptly responded to an ad for a part-time bartender position at The Interval.

Jennifer Colliau, The Interval’s first Beverage Director. 

“The job listing was decidedly different,” Caudle says. “It gave me a glimpse of how unique The Interval is.”

Following a promising interview with then-Bar Manager Haley Samas-Berry, Caudle returned to The Interval a few days later for a stage. Expecting to find Samas-Berry behind the bar, Caudle was mortified to find Colliau there instead. Caudle was, suffice it to say, a little intimidated:  

I walked over with my shakers and spoons and jigger, hands trembling, and she asked if I wouldn’t mind making drinks with their tools instead. I said, “Sure,” as I walked into the other room to set my things down. Inside I was completely freaking out. It took every bit of my strength to emerge from that space. I already felt in over my head and this amplified it. For the next hour or so I welcomed guests and set down menus and poured water. Every time a drink order came in Jennifer would stand over my shoulder and recite the recipe to me while correcting a litany of technical mistakes that I was making. The torture finally relented and we went upstairs and had a good conversation. But I remember leaving that night thinking there was just no way in hell I was going to get that job. 

Caudle got the job. And now, following years of excellent work, he’s got Colliau’s old job, too. 

We spoke with Caudle about his new role, his approach to cocktail creation and design, and what Interval patrons can expect once the bar fully reopens.

Your promotion to Beverage Director brings the opportunity to try new things, while also contending with a rich legacy from past Beverage Directors Jennifer Colliau and Todd Carnam. What new things are you excited to bring to the table? What do you hope to maintain from the past?

I feel uniquely positioned as I have worked in the space under the tutelage of both Jennifer and Todd. 

Jennifer set the standard and created the beverage identity of The Interval. She taught us that we can’t unknow things. To that end, I’m excited to continue the pursuit of the best version of a beverage, meticulously molding it while uncovering its rich history.

The Interval’s former Beverage Directors Jennifer Colliau and Todd Carnam. 

Todd is a storyteller and a curmudgeonly romantic at heart. He taught us that a drink can evoke a feeling and connect to a larger narrative, of the cocktail’s role as a totem. I hope to honor that spirit and the creativity it fosters in my approach to menu development.

Foremost, I’m excited to feature wine, beer, and spirits made by people that don’t look like me. I’m personally captivated by the fantastic complexity of what eventually winds up in a glass on the bar. Every drink is the confluence of many brilliant makers and I seek to pay respect to their efforts. I think it is easy for us to forget that alcohol is an agricultural product. It started as a plant in the ground in a corner of the world and so many things had to go right for it to find its way to us. I hope to imbue our staff with a passion for the process of making these delicious products and to craft drinks that honor them.

A trio of selections from The Interval’s Old Fashioned menu.

What’s your approach to cocktail design and creation?

I can be somewhat reluctant to design new drinks. The cocktail world has such a rich history and so many people have contributed across generations. With that in mind, I often find myself focusing on making the very best version of a beverage that we know well or that may have been overlooked. 

It tends to take me a long time to mold a bigger picture of what the theme of a cocktail or a menu should be. Once I have that in place I get excited to uncover pieces that fit into the whole. Our Tiki Not Tiki menu is a great example. After we established that template, I found myself scouring cocktail books and menus for tropical drinks that didn’t fit into the Tiki canon. Each discovery was a revelation, a spark to continue forth.

Mai Tai from The Interval’s Tiki Not Tiki menu. 

What’s one of the most challenging cocktails for The Interval to make? 

Generally, we like to do as much work behind the scenes preparing ingredients and putting things together ahead of time to ensure cocktails get to guests quickly.

The Interval’s take on the Kalimotxo.

I will say that one of our biggest challenges in development came with the Kalimotxo. This simple Spanish blend of Coca Cola and box wine was incredibly difficult to replicate. For starters, it was extremely trying to imitate the singular flavor of coke, eventually replacing its woodsy vanilla with Carpano Antica and its baking spice notes with lots of Angostura. Harder still was finding a red wine that didn’t overpower the rest of the ingredients. In the end, we wound up bringing in an entirely new wine outside of our offerings just to get the final flavor profile we were looking for.

Everyone has different tastes, but what would you recommend as a cocktail for a first-timer to the Interval to highlight what distinguishes the establishment from other cocktail bars?

The Interval’s Navy Gimlet.

The Navy Gimlet perfectly encapsulates what we strive for at The Interval. With the time involved to infuse navy strength gin with lime oil and to slowly filter the finished product, its preparation takes days but arrives to the guest in no time at all. The gimlet has been maligned for decades as a result of artificial ingredients and certain preparations and we’ve done our very best to correct those deficiencies. We make a delicious lime cordial and stir (rather than shake) our pearlescent iteration. It’s a drink with a history, deceptively simple and infinitely refreshing.

A busy evening at The Interval, May 02016. 

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about tending bar?

I think the physical act of bartending is unnecessarily heralded in the public eye. Anyone can mix drinks. Sure, there are hundreds of classics to memorize and plenty of muscle memory to establish, but that side of tending bar is overwhelmingly a teachable skill.

The component that cannot be taught as easily is hospitality. There is a degree of empathy and emotional availability necessary to do this work that isn’t required in many other professions. Bartenders absorb the energy of every guest that sits in front of them and a genuine desire to serve is essential to providing a superior guest experience. This comes naturally to some and can be a lifelong pursuit for others. Putting aside the day thus far and being truly hospitable behind the bar is the goal we spend our careers striving for. 

For the latest on opening hours, placing to-go orders, and events, head to The Interval’s website , or follow The Interval on Instagram , Twitter , and Facebook .

Quote of the Day: Confucius

Touching the Future

Aboriginal fish traps.

In search of a new story for the future of artificial intelligence, Long Now speaker Genevieve Bell looks back to its cybernetic origins — and keeps on looking, thousands of years into the past.

From her new essay in Griffith Review:

In this moment, we need to be reminded that stories of the future – about AI, or any kind – are never just about technology; they are about people and they are about the places those people find themselves, the places they might call home and the systems that bind them all together.

Genevieve Bell, “Touching the Future” in Griffith Review.