The Clock of Long Now, Burtynsky’s 10,000-year Gallery and Carbon Transfer Prints

Over the last few years, Edward Burtynsky has been investigating the possibilities of long-term preservation for artifacts in hopes of finding a proper home for the 10,000-year Clock (also known as the “Clock of the Long Now”) and, in turn, has rediscovered a process for producing photographic prints that could resist fading for - no joke - as long as it takes for the Clock to cycle. Burtynsky has proposed the creation of a 10,000-year Gallery to house the Clock alongside a slowly rotated selection of long-life photographs. If you’re anything like me, you’re getting chills just imagining a gallery space with the Clock (ticking once a year, the century hand advancing once every one hundred years, the cuckoo coming out on the millennium) and photographs lining the walls. Here’s an excerpt from the Blog of Long Now, explaining more:

Photographer Edward Burtynsky made a formal proposal for a permanent art gallery in the chamber that encloses the 10,000-year Clock in its Nevada mountain. The gallery would consist of art in materials as durable as the alloy steel and jade of the Clock itself, and it would be curated slowly over the centuries to reflect changing interests in the rolling present and the accumulating past. Photographs in particular should be in the 10,000-year Gallery, Burtynsky said, “because they tell us more than any previous medium. When we think of our own past, we tend to think in terms of family photos.” Burtynsky went on a quest for a technical solution. He thought that automobile paint, which holds up to harsh sunlight, might work if it could be run through an inkjet printer, but that didn’t work out. Then he came across a process first discovered in 1855, called “carbon transfer print.” It uses magenta, cyan, and yellow inks made of ground stone-the magenta stone can only be found in one mine in Germany-and the black ink is carbon. On the stage Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of his ultra-high resolution photographs. The color and detail were perfect. Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in someone’s living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality. Kept in the Clock’s mountain in archival conditions it would remain unchanged for 10,000 years.