A small but growing set of artistic and cultural works are currently taking place across the planet which are expected to unfold anywhere from 100 years to over 1B years. Some of these works are featured below and will be profiled by Project 100+. Through their lives, stories, practices and work, the people behind each of these projects invite us to cultivate care beyond our own lifetimes.
Dear Ancestor (Unceded First Nations Land/Australia)
A letter was written by the author to her descendants, pre-empting their birth as future ancestors.
Writer: Chelsea Watego
Duration: Limitless
Century Camera (Berlin, Germany)
On May 16th 2014, 100 pinhole cameras were distributed across Berlin to anyone willing to pay a 10 Euro deposit. Recipients were then asked to hide those cameras around the city–anywhere they want, pointed at anything they want. One century later, on May 16 2114, descendants of the original hundred Berliners, will retrieve these cameras and return them to a gallery. They will be given their ancestor’s 10 euro deposit and the photographs, century-long exposures of the city, will go on display.
Artist: Jonathan Keats.
Producer: Team Titanic Art Gallery
Duration: 100 years
Pinhole cameras from Century Camera, Berlin, Germany. Credit © Jonathan Keats. Image courtesy of the artist.
A seedling at the site of Future Library, outside of Oslo, Norway. Credit © Katie Paterson. Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York
Future Library (Oslo, Norway)
In 2014, a forest was planted in Norway, which will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in 100 years time. Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unread and unpublished, until the year 2114. The manuscripts will be presented in a specially designed room in the new public library, Oslo. Writers to date include Margaret Atwood (2014), David Mitchell (2015), Sjón (2016), Elif Shafak (2017), Han Kang (2018), Karl Ove Knausgård (2019), and Ocean Vuong (2020).
Artist: Katie Paterson
Producer: Anne Beate Hovind (Bjørvika Utvikling )
Duration: 100 years
SEED (Tasmania, Australia)
Fossilised machinery, ancient bones of car bodies and compressed layers of steel: Seed imagines a monument to memorialise our environ-metal age. Launching in October 2021, using cars found abandoned along the West Coast, this industrial installation will be completed by Queenstown’s unique natural processes and unveiled in 100 years. Bringing together the sacred and the discarded, the organic and the industrial, this work embodies a ritual of contrast that honours the complex knowledge held by the land.
Artists: Alexandra Tálamo, Steven Cybulka, Su-An Ng, Jamie Graham-Blair, Rory Wray-McCann, David Fitzpatrick, Emma Porteus.
Duration: 100+ years
Elected officials, researchers and supporters climbed to the top of what once was the Okjokull glacier to commemorate the first glacier lost to climate change in Iceland. Credit. Felipe Dana/AP
Ok Glacier Memorial (Iceland)
In August 2019, a funeral ceremony was held at the site of Okjökull, the first of Icelands 400 glaciers to be lost to climate change. A memorial located at the site of the former glacier includes a plaque written to future generations in the year 2219. By this time it is expected that all of Iceland’s glaciers will have suffered the same fate.
Anthropologists/Producers: Cymene Howe & Dominic Boyer
Writer: Andri Snaer Magnason
Duration: 200 years
Organ²/ASLSP ~ As Slow as Possible (Halberstadt, Germany)
An organ in St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt in 2001 began a performance that is due to end in 2640. ASLSP is an 8 page musical score and the subject of one of the longest-lasting musical performances yet undertaken. The next note will be played on 5th February 2022.
Composer: John Cage
Duration: 639 years
Letters to the Future (Vietnam)
Between 2020 and 2021 a book was created with a projected lifespan of 1000 years. It contains 327 letters written to future generations collected from 22 countries over the course of 4 months. The book is made from a rainbow of single use plastic collected from the streets and streams of Vietnam.
Artist: Kumkum Fernando
Producer: Ki Saigon
Duration: 1000 years
Longplayer (London, U.K)
Longplayer is a one thousand year long musical composition. It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again.
Artist: Jem Finer
Producer: Michael Morris (Artangel)
Duration: 1000 years
Millennium Camera (U.S.A)
Pinhole cameras have been installed in three locations around the United States — Amherst College, Arizona State University and Lake Tahoe — that are designed to take 1000-year-long exposures of their surroundings.
Artist Jonathan Keats
Duration: 1000 years
Centuries of the Bristlecone (Mount Washington, USA)
Pinus longaeva, commonly known as the bristlecone pine tree, have a lifespan that can exceed five thousand years. Centuries of the Bristlecone is a new 5000-year calendrical index that tells the time as experienced by the Great Basin Bristlecone Pines. An alternative to the Gregorian Calendar and the atomic clock, Centuries of the Bristlecone recalls a period when time was kept by cicada songs, the flowering of artichokes and the migration of cranes.
Artist: Jonathan Keats
Producers: Long Now Foundation & Nevada Museum of Art
Duration: 5000 years
Clock of the Long Now (Western Texas, USA)
Inside a mountain in Western Texas, a monument-sized clock that will function for the next 10,000 years is in the final stages of being built. A new cultural icon to long-term thinking, The Clock of the Long Now is over 20 years in the making. Once complete, its founders hope it will become a global pilgrimage destination that invites us all to ask ourselves, how can we be better ancestors?
Engineer: Danny Hillis
Producer: Alexander Rose (Long Now Foundation)
Duration: 10,000 years
The Last Pictures (Geosynchronous orbit around Earth)
In 2012, a satellite was sent into space containing a visual record intended for a far future audience. Attached to the outside of the satellite is a gold plated case holding 100 black and white photographs representing human civilisation in all its forms. The satellite will remain in orbit around the Earth for over 1B years.
Artist: Trevor Paglen
Producer: Nato Thompson (Creative Time).
Duration: 1B+ years
