Lasting 1,000 years, Jem Finer’s Longplayer is famously the longest non-repeating piece of music ever composed. Originally commissioned by Artangel, it’s been playing continually at listening posts around the world since the first moments of the millennium.

Longplayer is a one thousand year long musical composition. It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. Conceived and composed by Jem Finer, it was originally produced as an Artangel commission, and is now in the care of the Longplayer Trust.

You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome. (See the world eco-region map ). At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you? Most of us are ignorant of this matrix. But it is the biggest interactive game there is. Hacking it is both fun and vital.

these interventions have functioned in my life exactly as I believe they were intended to: they expanded and refined my perceptions, helped me look at the world around me in a different light, and even occasionally urged me to one or another practical decision about the way I wanted to live my life.

Boing Boing tv guest correspondent Todd Lappin (R) and cameraninja Eddie Codel (L) trek to the Long Now Foundation's first-ever Mechanicrawl event, and bring back tales of early analog computing, fantastic timepieces, and impossibly eccentric mechanical things.

The idea to build a monument scale, multi-millennial, all mechanical clock as an icon to long term thinking came from computer scientist Danny Hillis and was published in the form of an email to friends. Later it was followed up with an essay published in the 01995 Wired magazine scenarios isssue (shown below). Danny reasoned that by actually building a remote monument, the discussions around long term thinking would be far more focused, and it would lend itself to good storytelling and myth. Two key requirements of anything lasting a long time.

Its organisers call it the longest concert in the world. Almost seven years in, and with 632 years left, it is unlikely anyone will challenge the claim.

founder and CEO of "Second Life," Philip Rosedale, will explore some of the early lessons about long-term thinking (and everything else) to be gleaned from the emergent behaviors of massive multi-player world building...

In conversation with Brian Eno - musician, artist and co-founder of the Long Now Foundation - Johnson will explore what a cholera outbreak in the nineteenth century can tell us about solving the long term challenges we face in the twenty-first century.

this is not just a way of seeing but also a way of thinking: moving conceptually from the scale of DNA to the scale of personality all the way up to social movements and politics — and back again.

How could you live so blind to your surroundings? How could you not think of ‘where I live’ as including at least some of the space outside your four walls, some of the bits you couldn’t lock up behind you? I felt this was something particular to Ne