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Experimental new camera will capture one single image from 1,000 years of photos
Researchers at the University of Arizona College of Fine Arts have installed an experimental camera, that will capture just one image over the course of 1,000 years to encourage people to take a moment and reflect on what the future holds for the generations to come.
The brain behind the Millenium camera, Jonathan Keats, emphasizes that his experiment “by no means” aims at making a statement about “development”, but it’s instead created to propel humans out of the temporary vision of life and think about the future.
Millennium camera will capture single image over 1000 years
The Millennium camera is said to be one of its kind and it is designed to capture the image of the Tucson, Arizona landscape over the next ten centuries.
Positioned on a hiking trail to overlook the landscape, the equipment is made of a steel pole with a copper cylinder atop it. The pin-sized hole in a thin 24-karat gold inside the cylinder is where the light will penetrate to fall on the surface treated with an oil paint pigment called rose madder – made from the madder lake pigment.
Jonathan hopes the material will gradually change over the years to create an image that will be recognizable, but the camera should only be opened in 3023 to ensure the imaging won’t diminish.
The future humans will get to see an “extremely long exposure image of Tucson through all its future iterations.” While the more static parts of the regions will appear clearly, anything in the frame subject to changes or movement will look blurred.
The Millennium camera has been installed next to a bench saving over the Star Pass neighborhood and is meant for hikers to stop and think about the future.
Experiment is thought-provoking, say researchers
It’s hard to imagine life a few years from now, let alone centuries later. But Jonathan and the team believe our imagination of the next 1000 years is pivotal to mankind, regardless of what’s to happen.
The placement of the camera on Tumamoc Hill encourages hikers and passersby to engage with the device as they think about the future.
Speaking of the importance of the place and its role in the experiment, Jonathan said: “Tumamoc Hill has a very deep relationship with the people of Tucson and the hill has a history to it that has this great vantage metaphorically and literally for looking across generations.”
“The petroglyphs on Tumamoc Hill, for example, are a record of people looking very carefully at their environment and leaving a trace of what they’ve seen. That is really a form of communication across generations. In the same spirit, the Millennium Camera provides a way to observe and interact,” he added further.
The researcher believes humans have a very “bleak outlook” on the future, so whether the version of Tucson revealed in the final image is worse or not, the least humans can do is reimagine it to work towards making it better.
However, the experiment is not devoid of hiccups. There is a possibility that the camera may not function as expected for the next 100 years or it may go unnoticed among future humans.
Jonathan notes: “The camera might not even be around in a millennium. There are forces of nature and decisions people make, whether administrative or criminal, that could result in the camera not lasting.”
