Stewart Brand's Blog, page 81

A conversation with Laura Cunningham and Ryan Phelan

Join artist and ecologist Laura Cunningham and Ryan Phelan at the David Brower Center in Berkeley on Wednesday evening, December 5th, for a conversation jointly presented by The Long Now Foundation and the Brower Center. “A Landscape Flux” will blend Laura Cunningham’s long-term perspective on California ecological history with Ryan Phelan’s work, including a new Long Now project on extinct species revival, Revive and Restore.

The talk is part of a series of events associated with Laura Cunningham’s exhibit at the Brower Center, “Before California.” The exhibit is based on her artistic reconstructions of the region’s ecological history, published in the book A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California. In October 02011, Laura Cunningham presented the talk “Ten Millennia of California Ecology” as one of The Long Now Foundation’s Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

We hope to see you at the talk, which is free and open to the public. Please see the Brower Center website for details, and Brown Paper Tickets to RSVP.

In conversation with Ryan Phelan of The Long Now Foundation, Laura Cunningham will explore the theme of changing natural landscapes and time’s effect on them, reminding us that the landscapes we see today are merely a snapshot of an ever-changing world in constant flux.

A Landscape Flux

The David Brower Center

6:30 pm to 9:00 pm Wednesday, December 5th, 02012

Conversation with Laura Cunningham and Ryan Phelan: 7:00 – 8:00

Book Signing in the Gallery: 8:00 – 9:00

Visit the gallery by the end of January to see Laura Cunningham’s exhibit.

Laura Cunningham: Before California

The David Brower Center

Hazel Wolf Gallery (Fourth Annual Art/Act Exhibition)

Exhibit dates: September 13, 02012 – January 30, 02013

Help Long Now build a new space for long-term thinking

The Long Now Foundation is creating a new place for ideas, and it will serve great cocktails!

We have begun a campaign to transform our space in Fort Mason into a salon, museum, cafe and bar.  We invite you to check out the video and if you can, please support us by reserving a Founders Bottle of one of the amazing spirits created exclusively for the project by St George Distillery in Alameda. We welcome group and company donations as well if the bottles are out of your personal price range.

Thank you for your support,

Alexander Rose

executive director

The Long Now Foundation

Lazar Kunstmann and Jon Lackman Seminar Media

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Preservation without Permission: the Paris Urban eXperiment

Tuesday November 13, 02012 – San Francisco

Audio is up on the Kunstmann and Lackman Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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Preservation Without Permission – a summary by Stewart Brand

Their video showed clandestine urban “infiltration” (trespassing) at its most creative. Paris’s Urban Experiment group (UX), now in their fourth decade, have a restoration branch called Untergunther. They evade authorities to carry out secret preservation projects on what they call “nonvisible heritage.”

Being clandestine, they do not reveal their activities except for instances that become publicized in the media; then they reveal everything to set the record straight (and embarrass the media along with the authorities). In the video presented by Untergunther member Lazar Kunstmann and translator Jon Lackman, we see a hidden underground screening room and bar beneath the Trocadero in Paris’s Latin Quarter. When police discover it and shut it down, the equipment is surreptitiously removed to a site deeper in the city’s vast network of underground passages, where film showings continue to this day. One year the group’s annual film festival was staged and performed overnight in one of Paris’s great monuments, the Panthéon, built in 1790. In the video (excerpt here) we see a small boy slipping through newly crafted underground passageways, picking a lock, opening the cupboard with all the Panthéon‘s keys, and gliding on his skateboard beneath the great dome across the ornate marble floors by Foucault’s original pendulum as film enthusiasts set up a temporary theater and have a clandestine film festival—gone without a trace by dawn.

Elsewhere in the Panthéon the explorers found a neglected old clock displaying stopped time to the public. In 2005 they decided to repair it. They converted an abandoned room high in the monument into a clock shop and hangout. With clockmaker (and UX member) Jean-Baptiste Viot they spent a year completely reconditioning the 1850 works of the clock. Now that it worked again, they thought it should keep time and chime proudly, but someone needed to wind it. They approached the Director of the Panthéon, Bernard Jeannot, who didn’t even know that the monument had a clock. At first dumbfounded, Jeannot publicly embraced the project and applauded Untergunther.

Jeannot’s superiors at the Centre des Monuments Nationaux accordingly fired him (early retirement) and brought suit against Untergunther. The court determined that fixing clocks is not a crime, and in France trespassing on public property is, in itself, not a crime. Case dismissed. Spitefully, the new Director of the Panthéon has made sure the clock remains unwound, and he disabled it by removing an essential part.

Lazar Kunstmann explained (through Jon Lackman) Untergunther’s perspective on cultural heritage, particularly “minor” heritage—the countless objects that embody cultural continuity but don’t attract institutions to protect them. Who is responsible for such “nonvisible” heritage? The protectors should be local, self-appointed, and nonvisible themselves, because exposure of the value of the objects attracts destructive tourists. Preservation without permission works best without visibility.

Since 2005, Untergunther’s new precautions against discovery have successfully kept its ongoing preservation projects hidden. As for the Panthéon clock, that essential part the Director removed to disable it has been purloined to safekeeping with Untergunther. Someday authorities may allow the clock to tick again. In the meantime it is in good repair.

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

Peter Warshall Seminar Primer

“Enchanted by the Sun: The CoEvolution of Light, Life, and Color on Earth”

Wednesday November 28, 02012 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco

Peter Warshall’s work is aimed at helping people understand the cultural and ecological systems in which they’re embedded. He studied biology at Harvard, anthropology under Claude Lévi-Strauss, and has worked in communities and companies the world over, consulting on conservation and helping build consensus among groups with diverse and often conflicting environmental needs.

He was an editor and contributor to the Whole Earth Review, where he often expressed his deep understanding of ecology and human nature through poetic, interdisciplinary essays. In 1998, he offered a brief exploration of the similarities between painting and ecology, discussing, for example, trends in composition and color and how they relate to the analysis of ecosystems:

Henri Matisse (in his cutout phase), Gustav Klimt, and Paul Klee experimented tirelessly with configurations of patches of color: different sizes, the shape of each patch, the orientation of “floating” patches with the canvas’s straight edges and with other patches inside the artwork’s boundaries. Landscape ecologists similarly ponder patches such as beaver ponds in a watershed or forest groves dotted among evenly textured farmlands. The “right” configuration can bring harmony to either canvas or landscape. To conservation biologists, for instance, the size and shape of a patch of forest may mean the difference between protection of a rare warbler’s home or nest parasitism by cowbirds. Informed intuition serves both painters and naturalists well.

- Art as Landscape/Landscape as Art

To bolster one’s informed intuition about place, he offers a quiz that Kevin Kelly once declared a Cool Tool. It starts with a simple declaration to “Point North,” and concludes by asking if you can “Name two places on different continents that have similar sunshine/rainfall/wind and temperature patterns to here.”

Warshall leads us on a journey from inside our brains out into nature and on up to the Sun on November 28th at the Cowell Theater. You can reserve tickets, get directions and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page.

Subscribe to the Seminars About Long-term Thinking podcast for more thought-provoking programs.

Rick Prelinger Seminar Tickets

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly
Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Rick Prelinger on
“Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 7″
TICKETS
Tuesday December 11, 02012 at 7:30pm Castro Theater
Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! • General Tickets $10

 

About this Seminar:

Rick Prelinger, a guerrilla archivist who collects the uncollected and makes it accessible, presents the 7th of his annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco screenings. You’ll see an eclectic montage of rediscovered and rarely-seen film clips showing life, landscapes, labor and leisure in a vanished San Francisco as captured by amateurs, newsreel cameramen and studio filmmakers.

New sequences in this year’s high-definition feast will include the Japanese-American community in the Western Addition before redevelopment; shipwrecks off the Northern shoreline; 1930s demonstrations for China Relief; even more Sutro Baths scenes; family films from the Mission, Richmond, Sunset and Excelsior Districts; rediscovered films of San Francisco transit; and newly discovered, never-shown documentary footage of the Tenderloin and waterfront. Much of the show will be scanned from Kodachrome and original 35mm material.

As usual, this year’s Castro Theatre screening is an interactive experience: audience members will BE the soundtrack, identifying places and events, asking questions, loudly discussing San Francisco’s past and future as the film unreels.

Finally, if you have family or historical films of San Francisco, it’s not too late to help out — please contact Rick through The Long Now Foundation, and we’ll arrange to have your films scanned and possibly included in this year’s show!

Our Story in 1 Minute

Our Story in 1 Minute – a quick, inspiring reminder of how far we’ve come, with original music by MelodySheep aka John Boswell.

(Thanks, Stuart!)

The Bedrock of Politics

NPR’s Robert Krulwich recently shared on his blog a fantastic stitching together of processes that operate on vastly different time scales: geology, economics and politics. It took the eye of a geologist – Steven Dutch – to recognize the deep-time significance of a narrow corridor of counties running through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and into the Carolinas that voted majority Democratic in the 02008 U.S. presidential election. That swath of land is largely populated by African Americans, which is the most immediate part of the answer, but the story begins about 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period.

The Deep South had a shoreline that curled through the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, and there, in the shallow waters just offshore, were immense populations of floating, single-celled creatures who drifted about, trapped sunshine, captured carbon, then died and sank to the sea bottom. Those creatures became long stretches of nutritious chalk.

When sea levels dropped and North America took on its modern shape, those ancient beaches — so alkaline, porous and rich with organic material — became a “black belt” of rich soil, running right through the South.

That’s the geology part of the equation. Then comes the economics – when Europeans began farming crops like cotton in the South, they were using slaves. The most fertile areas were where slavery was most profitable, so the percentage of the population that was black became the highest in the region. That demography – or, at least, very significant traces of it – remains today, and is responsible for the political part of the story.

This, says marine biologist McClain, explains that odd stretch of Obama blue; it’s African-Americans sitting on old soil from ancient organisms that turned sunshine into fertilizer.

Stewart Brand, co-founder of The Long Now Foundation, has described what he calls ‘layers of time,’ (described on our website). Different sorts of processes operate on different time scales, and those processes are layered one on top of the other – there is a sort of foundational order to them. Nature operates slowly. Culture operates more quickly, and is based on nature. The political landscape is many layers above the geological landscape. This story illustrates brilliantly one of the ways in which geology shines through the millennia to shape the quicker, more malleable processes of our human activities.

Looking Back on the 21st Century

“These days, excess energy is very expensive, but for most people it just doesn’t matter. Most communities are locally self-sufficient. Everyone grows food using permaculture principles. Agricultural monoculture became deeply unfashionable during the great GM disease outbreaks of the 2030s. During the chaos, we were smart enough to keep the Internet going. Giving up broadcast television meant wireless broadband really took off. That, combined with holographic conferencing, meant that people finally could really live anywhere they liked while working somewhere else. With no need to travel for meetings, commuting vanished like a bad dream. Of course, the need for real human contact didn’t. most towns, villages, and districts have communal working areas, paid for out of local taxes in local currencies, which let you work together with your friends and neighbors these mix/meet spaces are incredibly creative.”

Perhaps this is how the people of the year 02100 will look back at the developments of the 21st century. Or maybe it’ll look more like this:

“It is five minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve at the end of the last day of the twenty-first century. In Dar es Salam, one of the wealthiest cities in the United States of Southern Africa (USSA), revelers from across the region have traveled on the Trans-Africa high-speed train network to witness the arrival of the new century at a massive fireworks display and international gathering in East Africa’s “harbor of peace.” Wearing a variety of light, thermo-regulated fabrics in bright, fashionable colors, party-goers and families mill around in droves at the city’s popular waterfront overlooking the Indian ocean, its warm waters an ancient conduit of intercontinental trade.”

These scenarios appear in The Futurist’s series on Exploring the year 2100. The magazine recently invited members of the World Future Society to imagine what human life might look like in 02100, and the result is a diverse collection of essays that offer colorful glimpses of possible futures. The collection also features an article by futurist and Long Now Board member Paul Saffo, who predicts that we’ll live longer, more curious, and more spiritual lives:

“In 2020, science’s relentless explanatory logic had believers on the run, but in the decades that followed, it became clear that an ever stranger, more capacious universe had ample room for the divine, the spiritual, the mystical, and the mysterious.”

To read more about these and other glimpses of the future, pay a visit to the World Future Society’s corner of the web!

The Long History of New World Wine

The term “New World Wine” may be a bit of a misnomer.

In 01976, a British wine merchant introduced California wines to France by organizing a blind tasting event for local connoisseurs. To everyone’s great surprise, bottles from California won first place in each category, and thereby earned a place on the international map of fine wine.

This “Judgment of Paris” may have brought California wine to the global stage, but unbeknownst to many of those tasters (and to many wine lovers today), California has been making wine since long before the 01970s. In fact, California’s winemaking industry may be about as old as the United States itself.

Viticulture was first brought to the Western United States by Spanish missionaries in the 18th century. Because they needed wine for the performance of Mass, these missionaries had brought vine cuttings with them from Mexico, and planted a vineyard by every new mission established in California. In those days, they cultivated and fermented what was known as the “Mission grape,” which had originated in Spain but found its niche in the New World. Until about 01850, most California wine was made from this Mission grape; today, only a handful of producers still grow this varietal.

The Gold Rush of the late 19th century brought new waves of migrants to California, and gave a new boost to the burgeoning winemaking industry. California offered a favorable climate for grape growing, and with a growing demand for wine, many European settlers tried their hand at cultivating grapes. Armed with new varietals and new winemaking techniques, these growers established the first commercial wineries in Northern California.

In 01920, Prohibition put a damper on the winemaking industry. A few wineries were able to switch to the production of sacramental wine or grape juice, but most were forced to close their doors, and many a vineyard withered. After the twenty-first amendment was passed in 01933, the industry embarked on a long process of recovery, finally culminating in a renaissance during the late 01960s and 70s.

Despite the impact of Prohibition, many of today’s most celebrated Northern California wineries have a long legacy that dates back more than a century. Charles Krug Winery was founded in 01861 by a man of the same name, and thereby became the first commercial winery in the Napa Valley. Schramsberg, a producer of sparkling wine, was established just a year later. The brothers Beringer founded their winery in 01876, and Chateau Montelena – producers of the Chardonnay that won the Judgment of Paris – dates from 1882.

But perhaps the oldest of Northern California’s wineries is located in Sonoma. Founded in 01857, Buena Vista Winery spearheaded the development of the region’s winemaking industry. Its founder, ‘Count’ Agoston Haraszthy, introduced new European grape varietals to the area, pioneered new winemaking methods, and established a local viticultural society. It is here that Charles Krug learned how to make wine before he went on to establish his own business in Napa, four years later.

Financial troubles forced Buena Vista to close its doors in the late 19th century. Despite several attempts at revival, the winery has been unable to reclaim its past glory – until recently, that is. In 2011, the winery was bought and then carefully restored by Burgundy Native Jean-Charles Boisset. His goal in this project was not just to produce great wine; Boisset hoped to offer a tribute to California’s long legacy of viticulture.

“A lot of people think that the California wine world was born in 1976 after the Judgment of Paris tasting, but no, it started way before,” he said. “The wines are great, but we can explain to people what a great region it is through its long-lost heritage.”

Buena Vista winery reopened its doors this past summer to offer tours of its historic facilities, and tastings of its new bottlings. A great start to a history-themed tour of the Napa and Sonoma valleys, perhaps?

Preserving Virtual Worlds

“This is our history, and just a handful of people are saving it.”

– PixelVixen707, screen name of “Rachael Webster,” a fictional character in the alternate reality game Personal Effects: Dark Art

Virtual games are becoming cultural artifacts. Yes, they are commodities, (the global market for video games is forecast to hit $82 billion by 02017) but, beyond entertainment, they also facilitate complex exchanges between many members of society.  It would be impossible to provide an accurate record of much of our existing popular culture without archiving games.

Take the online world EA Land, formerly The Sims Online, for example.  The service was generating very little revenue, despite the re-branding, resulting in its sudden demise (a common phenomenon in the digital realm). Electronic Arts pulled the plug just weeks after its debut as EA Land — its designer became its destroyer. Amidst avatars exchanging hugs and tearful goodbyes, a virtual world winked out of existence with a whimper — a whimper that might have only been witnessed by the players had it not been for Stanford archival researcher Henry Lowood. He captured the virtual apocalypse presented in the 11-minute radio piece, “Game Over.” Roman Mars (now with 99% Invisible) originally produced this episode for Snap Judment along with Robert Ashley’s A Life Well Wasted (an Internet radio program about everything video games).

Preserving video games presents formidable challenges. These nebulous artifacts consist of platforms, operating systems and network communities. The digital content is interactive, which is just as defining as the code itself.  These challenges were the subject of Preserving Virtual Worlds (PVW), a two-year collaborative research venture geared towards preserving and exploring the history and cultural impact of interactive simulations and video games — saving video games for future generations (02008-02010). In addition to Henry Lowood of Stanford University, Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Linden Lab collaborated on the project.

PVW focused its investigation on a case set of eight different games, interactive fictions and virtual worlds. The case studies were selected from different time periods in gaming history, different platforms and different degrees of player involvement to maximize the potential problems that might prevent the games from being preserved in the long-term.  Based on their investigations into the games, they developed a set of requirements for game preservation.

Unlike a book in a library, computer games have very poorly defined boundaries that make it difficult to determine exactly what the object of preservation should be. Is it the source code for the program? The binary executable version of the program? Is it the executable program along with the operating system under which the program runs? Should the hardware on which the operating system runs be included? Ultimately, a computer game cannot be played without a complex and interconnected set of programs and hardware. Is the preservationist’s job maintaining a particular, operating combination of elements, or is to preserve the capability to produce an operating combination using existing software and hardware? Is it both? Once these questions of the boundaries of preservation have been addressed, there are a host of other difficulties presenting the would-be preservationist. What information, beyond the game itself, will we need to ensure continuing access to the game? How should librarians, archivists and preservationists go about organizing the bed of information needed to preserve a game? What strategy should we adopt to preserve software in a technological environment in which computing hardware and operating systems are undergoing constant and rapid evolution? Given the costs of preservation of normal library and archival materials, how can we possibly sustain the additional costs of preserving these complex and fragile technological artifacts?

Preserving Virtual Worlds 2 follows the initial report. PVW2 will focus on providing a set of best practices for preserving educational games and game franchises, such as Oregon Trail,  Carmen Sandiego and the Super Mario Brothers series.