 ALEXANDER ROSE
What information should be represented on the dials of a 10,000-year clock? If we could retrieve any single piece of information from 10,000 years ago, what should it be? Such dilemmas have occupied Alexander Rose since he became the first employee of the Long Now Foundation in 1997. He has spent the last three years as its director, working with Danny Hillis to create the first prototype of the Clock of the Long Now – a gigantic, mechanical 10,000-year clock to be built inside a mountain in an American desert. Simultaneously, the foundation has been looking for a storage medium capable of surviving the same 10,000-year time frame. At Doors 6, Alexander Rose and Brian Eno will talk about the latter project, which culminated in the Rosetta Disc, an anologue storage medium based on a zinc disc just 5cm across. The disc, a contemporary Rosetta Stone for the recovery of lost languages in the deep future, is inscribed with a text (based on world creation myths) in 1,000 languages. An industrial designer by training, Rose has been artist in residence at Silicon Graphics Inc, project manager for Shamrock Communications and director of Spirit Racing Systems. His interests include building robots for combat events.
Print
The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility
By Stewart Brand
Phoenix, London
ISBN 0-75381-012-3
www.longnow.org
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