Margaret Atwood's new work will remain unseen for a century
Atwood has just been named as the first contributor to an astonishing new public artwork. The Future Library project, conceived by the award-winning young Scottish artist Katie Paterson, began, quietly, this summer, with the planting of a forest of 1,000 trees in Nordmarka, just outside Oslo. It will slowly unfold over the next century. Every year until 2114, one writer will be invited to contribute a new text to the collection, and in 2114, the trees will be cut down to provide the paper for the texts to be printed – and, finally, read.
"it is the kind of thing you either immediately say yes or no to. You don't think about it for very long," said Atwood, speaking from Copenhagen. "I think it goes right back to that phase of our childhood when we used to bury little things in the backyard, hoping that someone would dig them up, long in the future, and say, 'How interesting, this rusty old piece of tin, this little sack of marbles is. I wonder who put it there?'"
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/05/margaret-atwood-new-work-unseen-century-future-library
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A time capsule for readers... neat
= new reply since forum marked as read
Planting a forest just to clear-cut it a century from now seems perverse.
Expecting that the infrastructure to manufacture and distribute dead-tree books will still be in place in 2114 seems short-sighted.
And for any author to expect that the world will still give a damn about them in the twenty-second century seems self-aggrandizing.
When I read this story somewhere yesterday, it got me to checking out time capsules. One of the earliest, the Detroit Century Box, was sealed in 1900 and opened in 2000. It turned out to feature leading citizens boasting "Our buildings of today are equipped with fast running elevators, heating, lighting, power plants" or "We travel by railroad and with steam power from Detroit to Chicago in less than eight hours" or "In AD 2000, I think it not improbable that Detroit will enjoy a population of fully four millions."
(According to Forbes, "Detroit's population is close to the same size now as it was in 1910, before the city's automotive boom began. The city's population peaked at 1.86 million in 1950. The 2012 U.S. Census showed the city with about 700,000 residents."
Is this really how you'd want the future to see you? I'd say it's better to take your chances with the present.
(And, oh yeah -- Forbes, what's with that 2012 census bit?)
