The WorkLife on earth is three-and-a-half billion years old (at least); our species, Homo sapiens, may be 250,000 years old, and our entire distinct lineage ... does not extend back more than 6 to 8 million years. Our personal lifetime, the psychological measure actually used as our basic temporal ruler for things considered long-lasting .. is but a joke of a moment compared to anything earthly.... Our misunderstanding of this temporal limit underscores most common errors about our role on earth.Ken Goldberg has performed a remarkable feat with Memento Mori. Try as we might to intellectually grasp the time scale and microscopic distances of plate tectonics, the formation of the planet, it is generally only when mountain tops blow off or cars teeter on the edge of an earthquake-destroyed bridge that we remember the earth is an active force. By creating his "interface to the earth" to be reminiscent of the vital signs of a health monitor, Goldberg viscerally establishes the earth as living, even fragile. Something to be protected. I remember anxiously, excitedly, watching a not dissimilar monitor trace the heartbeat of my children during the stressful passage to birth. Who is giving birth to whom?
Our threat is not to the earth at its ample scale. Our danger is to ourselves in our tiny little segment of time. (Gould)We have all seen a seismograph before. Many times. And yet, it is hard not to watch the phospherent, fading trace climb and fall across the interface--a .0005 mm "pulse"--without pangs of one's own mortality. Memento Mori. |
"Memento Mori is a web interface to the earth. It displays streaming seismographic data measured continuously from a site near the Hayward Fault above University of California at Berkeley. The earthquake detector is a Streckeisen STS-1 seismometer that measures vertical ground velocity. Data is collected by the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory and relayed to a server in the Alpha Lab. Your display is delayed 30 seconds due to frame buffering at the detector." Entry page, Memento Mori [With Telegarden] Goldberg uses a physical garden as an environment to stage social interaction and community in virtual space. He also uses the garden as a metaphor for demonstrating the importance of the care and feeding of the delicate social ecology of the net. --rp Masaki Fujihata "Light on the Net" project
We all remember the first time we used Mosaic and saw words and
images--gasp--displayed together. And then to click on those underlined blue words and be transported to another country, another world. For me, it is still magic, and I am a sucker for telepresence as a real time extension of the Web. Memento Mori is like an earthbeat.
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