This is an art project to capture the ‘world’s slowest photograph’ of the city of Tempe, Arizona.
A conceptual artist named Jonathon Keats from the University of Arizona is determined to achieve the “world’s slowest photograph” in the form of a 1,000-year exposure experiment of the city of Tempe, Arizona. Its opening date has already been set, although none of us will see it: the full experiment will be unveiled in a month-long exhibition at the Arizona State University Museum of Art in the year 3015.
An intriguing experiment
We don’t have to wait for artificial intelligence to reveal its predictions about what the world will look like or change in 1,000 years. Experimental philosopher and artist Jonathon Keats created the Millennium Camera , hoping to capture everything over the next millennium.
The Millennium Camera, as the professor from the College of Fine Arts at the University of Arizona has named the peculiar camera, is a device designed to take a single image of the landscape of Tucson, Arizona, over the course of a thousand years with the intention of provoking a deeper reflection on the past, present and future of humanity and what our society could be like when we enter the 31st century .
“Most people have a pretty bleak outlook on what lies ahead,” Keats says. “It’s easy to imagine that 1,000 years from now people might see a version of Tucson that’s much worse than what we see today, but the fact that we can imagine that isn’t a bad thing.” “It’s actually a good thing, because if we can imagine that, we can also imagine what else might happen, and therefore it might motivate us to take action to shape our future.”
Keats and a team of researchers set up the camera near a hiking trail overlooking Tucson, which is accompanied by a warning for viewers to reflect on what the future may hold into the next century.
How does the camera work?
According to the University of Arizona, there are currently no conventional photographic processes that are sensitive enough to capture an image over a millennium. So developing a camera that can not only take a single image over the course of 1,000 years, but also last that long, is no easy task. Keats’ solution to the problem is deep-time photography.
It’s a pinhole camera , which is nothing more than a copper cylinder with a thin sheet of 24-karat gold on one end, into which a tiny hole has been drilled. Sunlight filters through that hole and shines onto a light-sensitive surface on the back, which has been coated with multiple thin layers of an oil paint pigment called rose madder. So it essentially consists of a pinhole-sized hole in a thin sheet of 24-karat gold , through which light can shine onto a tiny copper cylinder . All this gear is mounted on a steel pole that points over the Arizona desert toward a neighborhood in Tucson. If all goes according to plan, the end result will be a thousand-year-long exposure photograph.
The camera will be pointed at the city skyline, capturing how civilization will change over the next 1,000 years. Inside is a light-sensitive surface coated with thin layers of the blonde-pink oil paint pigment, which will fade in the light, though whether this will happen at the right rate is an educated guess. Over time, the paint’s color will fade where the light hits the camera brightest, slowly, ever so slowly, creating an image of the Tempe skyline in red and white.
This experiment will be one that neither you nor I will live to see,
nor your children, nor your children’s children, nor their children’s children… (the artist says he won’t mind not being able to attend the unveiling of the photograph), but it will be something fascinating for those who can contemplate it and are already living in the 31st century.
However, even though the camera has been carefully designed, there is no guarantee that anyone in the future will be able to see the image it could theoretically produce.
“A thousand years is a long time and there are many reasons why this might not work,” Keats said in a press release. “The chamber might not even exist a millennium from now. There are forces of nature and decisions people make, whether administrative or criminal, that could cause the chamber to not last.”
“Most people have a pretty bleak outlook on what lies ahead,” Keats said. “It’s easy to imagine that 1,000 years from now people might see a version of Tucson that’s much worse than what we see today, but the fact that we can imagine that isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually a good thing, because if we can , if we imagine that, we’ll also be able to imagine what else might happen, and therefore it might motivate us to take action to shape our future.”
The artist and philosopher plans to install more chambers like this in other countries around the world, such as China or the Austrian Alps.
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