Millennium Camera: camera exposed for 1,000 years to record climate change

Not only is it an attempt, these cameras, if possible, will help future generations understand the impact of climate change on us.

Climate change is considered to be the most important challenge that our species has ever faced, but the wide range of issues and time scale can make it difficult for people to realize its evolution.

Therefore, an artist, who identified himself as an "experimental philosophy" , Jonathan Keats designed a video recorder without a lens or pinhole camera , to record a photo with time. 1,000-year exposure in Lake Tahoe, on the border of California and Nevada. He hopes this camera will help our children understand and help people visualize the long-term impact on the environment today.

Lake Tahoe pinhole camera.

Keats said: "We are changing the planet with a time range of 1,000 years, 10,000 years or even 100,000 years and we are completely incapable of evaluating the power we have. the means to get a kind of cognitive forgery, a mechanism for us to observe ourselves from a distant perspective in the future ".

The Millennium Camera

Keats placed his Millennium Camera (Millenium Camera) at 4 locations around Lake Tahoe. Each camera is made of copper and is only 2.75 inches (7 cm) long and has a radius of 2.25 inches (about 5.7 cm). Inside each camera is a 24-carat gold plate that drills a small hole.

When the light passes through that tiny hole, it will produce a reaction to the pink dye in the camera, causing the color to fade in the places where the light is strongest. This reaction will slowly create an image on the dye over the next 1,000 years.

Camera Millennium.

Even though pinhole cameras have been around since the early days of photography, Keats designed it to be particularly adaptable to its Millennium Cameras. Century cameras around Berlin in one of his previous projects created an image on a paper-based liquid glue, and it most likely could not survive for 1,000 years.

The problem is that the photography industry has only been around since the 19th century, so there is not enough data to determine what kind of photographic material will survive in such a time scale.

According to Keats, the best data he finds about image preservation for a long time comes from studies on Renaissance painting, with more than 500 years old. If a picture or a photo is exposed too long to the light, it will begin to fade. The color fading depends on both the amount of exposed light as well as the material that makes the painting.

The same effect has been applied on Keats' Millennium Camera. The main difference is that the small round hole on the camera will record the image from wherever the camera points, so when the dye in the camera starts to fade away, it will recreate the image.

To make sure the image will last for a thousand years, Keats borrowed a technique from Renaissance artists when working with copper. He rubbed on the pumice board, then rubbed it with garlic and finally put a layer of dye into it. After studying various types of dyes, Keats chose rose madder, a red dye extracted from the roots of celestial plants.

The photo will be colored like this.

A way to look back on yourself in the next generation

According to Keats, it took him years to build these Millennium Cameras. They originate from the project that Keats has done in Berlin, with dozens of cheap pinhole cameras that have been sold for only a few dollars each and have become a vehicle to document the city's changes. Buyers will place these cameras somewhere and leave them there for 100 years, until they are recalled and the photos will be displayed at the museum.

Keats said: "The idea is that these cameras can allow you to see yourself in the next generation, in the way a city grows. It also makes me think about longer-term possibilities and how they can. use them to observe a planet's transformation ".

Mr. Jonathan Keats and a pinhole camera set in the University of Arizona.

Before placing 4 Millennium Cameras around Lake Tahoe, Keats installed two more at Arizona State University and Amherst College in 2015, both lasting up to 1,000 years. He viewed the Millennium Camera as a "construction supervision" that occurred in a social scale, rather than just on a personal level.

For conventional long exposure photography, Keats' pinhole cameras will capture how the scene changes over the years. The sharpness of the image will depend on a number of factors, including the rate of change of the scene and whether the camera may exist when events occur.

"These changes can wipe the camera or wipe out the organization responsible for it , " Keats said. "I signed a contract with Sierra Nevada College to display these four photos in 3018".