TEMPE

World's slowest photo to capture 1,000 years in Tempe

Parker Leavitt
The Republic | azcentral.com
  • Experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats is bringing his newest project to Tempe.
  • Keats is installing a "millennium camera" designed to take a 1,000-year photo of the skyline.
  • The public is invited to join the project by creating and placing 100-year cameras around the city.

If a camera had been placed in Tempe 1,000 years ago, its lens may have captured the rise and fall of Native American societies, the appearance of Charles Hayden's flour mill along the Salt River and the rapid urban development now shaping the city's skyline.

So what will the next millennium bring? Will Tempe even exist in Year 3015, and will anything from the present day survive the journey?

Experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, famous for outrageous projects like genetically engineering deity and selling shares of his brain, this week revealed his latest thought-provoking endeavor — a millennium camera designed to take the slowest photograph in history.

The low-tech device, basically a copper tube with a small, 24-carat gold aperture, is anchored to a third-floor terrace at the Arizona State University Art Museum and aimed directly at downtown Tempe.

Over the next 10 centuries, light will sneak through a pinhole and gradually etch a single image into the rose madder paint on the camera's back wall. Nothing fleeting will be captured, only the constant reflection of the landscape — buildings, streets and perhaps long-living trees.

If the Subway restaurant currently at Mill Avenue and 10th Street is someday replaced by a skyscraper, for example, the camera might capture a clear image of the new tower, overlapping a ghost image of the long-forgotten sandwich shop.

Keats, who lives in San Francisco and northern Italy, introduced 100-year-exposure cameras last year in Berlin, but Tempe is the first place he's installed the 1,000-year version. He also plans to put one at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he studied philosophy, later this year.

While Keats approaches his thought experiments with the sincerity and eagerness of one who expects them to succeed, the projects serve to stoke conversation and curiosity regardless of their outcome.

For those involved with the millennium camera today, it's a mind-bending reach 40 generations into the future. And if anyone is around to open the capsule during a museum exhibition actually scheduled for 3015, the photo could provide an astounding visual history.

"It is as much about the conceptual as it is about the photographic," Keats said. "Acting in the present according to an awareness of the future ... can profoundly change the way we see and interact with the world."

In a small way, the millennium camera is similar to a microscope or a telescope in that it extends a person's view, Keats said. "Those were extending for the eye; this is extending for the mind's eye," he said.

The camera itself is on loan to the museum for the next 1,000 years, with ownership remaining with Keats, or the heir who can lay claim to it someday in the future. But the artwork, the image it captures, has been formally donated to ASU and assigned an acquisition number — 3015.001.000 — indicating the first item anticipated for collection that year.

Keats is also bringing an improved version of his 100-year cameras to the Valley and plans to spend much of the day Friday helping interested locals make their own.

The philosopher, artist and author will run an exhibit at ASU's Emerge 2015 festival at SkySong in Scottsdale, where visitors can make inexpensive tin-can century cameras. They are then expected to find a place within the city to anchor the camera and file the coordinates with the art museum.

ASU has also created paper versions of the camera, which people can cut out and fold themselves. "When you're very old, tell a child where you've hidden your [camera], and ask the child to retrieve it in 2115," the directions say.

Emerge 2015, a showcase of the future through art, performance and hands-on experience, runs Friday from 3 p.m. to midnight at 1475 N. Scottsdale Road.

Keats chose metro Phoenix and specifically Tempe for his project, believing the area serves as a case study on how suburban communities might grow into urban centers of more-sustainable living.

"It's perhaps one of the best models around for a way in which urbanization can happen over long periods of time," Keats said.