The Long Now | Overture | Fault Lines 2021
Montage by Hannes Bernard
Musical composition by O Future

The Long Now (2021) is both a work and a media research tool, developed and generated by a series of machines and databases of text, images and video footage with coded scripts prompting new and original montages and musical compositions with each screening. The Long Now attempts to engage and synthesize a more pluralist definition of the present by adopting a speculative and fictional future position.

As a tool, it processes these layers of complexity through generative techniques and a fictitious storyline in the tradition of programmatic music in performing arts such as opera and ballet. It does not aim to provide a singular answer or account, however, but rather to bring together (in visuals and dialogue) the multiple agents, components and aesthetics that contribute to the topology of the present.

This edition features additional materials harvested from research projects by members of the KABK Design and the Deep Future Research Group and was screened at the Fault Lines Research Forum 2021.