by, Jay Walljasper
Excerpted...
Danny Hillis, who pioneered the conceptual design behind high-speed super computers,
disagreed with Kern, warning that our obsession with speed forces us to lose
sight of the future and remain trapped in the present. He recommended cultivating
what he calls "a new aesthetic of slowness." To illustrate what that might look
like he told a story about Oxford University recently replaced the gigantic
oak beams in the ceiling of one of it's dining halls. When the beams began to
show signs of rotting, university officials were concerned that they wouldn't
be able to find lumber large and strong enough to replace them. But the university's
forester explained to them that, when the dinning hall was built 500 years ago,
their predecessors had planted a grove of oak trees so that the university could
replace the beams when the time came.
In that spirit, Hillis is now at work with musician Brian Eno and others on
designing the worlds slowest clock, which will chime just once a millennium.
He hopes that at a conference 3,000 years from now, people will look back on
our time and see this clock as a symbol of "the moment when they took responsibility
for the future. When they stopped believing in just now."
This article appeared in the March-April 01997 UTNE Reader.
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