Century Camera Concealed around Berlin’s 12 constituent bezirke, hidden from state and populace, are 100 tiny cameras. They are sunk into peepholes, peering unendingly over parkland, brownfield, suburbia and skyscrapers. At this moment, each one is taking a photograph. They will continue to take it for the next 100 years. These are pinhole cameras. Their casings are steel tea tins, the lids of which have been pricked in the middle to let in the light. Inside, in place of photographic film, there is a swatch of black paper. It is this that grants the camera its defining property: an exposure time of 100 years. Unlike film, the paper does not resolve into an image rapidly. It takes a century of light to sufficiently leach the pigment in the camera’s paper, bleaching in an image of whichever swathe of Berlin it watches over. It is the same process by which a newspaper left in the sun fades into obscurity. The Century Cameras were devised by conceptual artist Jonathan Keats as a way to grapple with change, a meditation on duration akin to Andy Warhol’s Empire, his eight-hour film of the Empire State Building, or John Cage’s Organ²/ASLSP, an eight-page organ score that may be played for 640 years (or longer, as dependent upon taste). “The effect you’ll end up with is a movie condensed into a single frame,” says Keats. “You could think of it as a time capsule that is making itself. The camera is constantly recording change. It’s a superimposition of present over past, whatever the present becomes over what it was.” Typically, a photograph represents a moment in time, its exposure short enough as to seem durationless. Yet rather than a moment, the photographs produced by the Century Cameras will depict an expanse of time. The trick has been played before – German photographer Michael Wesely has shot cities with three-year exposures – but never in so exaggerated a fashion. Objects in place for the full 100 years will block light from entering the camera and thereby appear clear and bold in the image. Those present for a shorter time (new buildings or structures demolished over the course of the century) will appear shadow-like, as in a double exposure. Moving objects – people and transport – will be captured as blurs or not at all. It means the end result will depict not so much a city, but rather the transformation a city undergoes over time. It is a fitting project for Berlin, a city that since the 1989 fall of the Wall has been emblematic of change in Europe. “People who live in Berlin feel their city is transforming,” says Keats, “but have difficulty gaining perspective on that. I was thinking about how a long span of time happening in a camera could therefore become a surrogate 198 Disegno. CENTURY CAMERA
for the experience of going through life, where everything is in the moment. In a sense, the camera becomes a psychological or mental prosthesis. We think of becoming cyborgs by wearing exoskeletons or by using Oculus Rift; this is a more extreme way to become one. You have the proposition of living past your lifespan through this camera carrying on observing after your death. It’s an action through which you could gain some long-term appreciation of existing in an enduring society.” In Keats’s hands this longtermism is pushed to extreme levels. Pinhole cameras – the preserve of throwaway school projects – become objects of intergenerational collaboration. Century Cameras were distributed to the public in May by Berlin gallery Team Titanic for a deposit of €10. Participants were asked to hide them around Berlin in locations of their choice. It is a community project with a caveat; every member will be dead by the time the cameras are ready in 2114. Participants need therefore to nominate a successor. It will fall to as-yet-unborn children to retrieve the cameras, return them to the gallery (if it still exists), extract the images, and collect the deposits (if the Euro hasn’t
is not really a conversation, it’s a shouting match,” he says. “But I wonder whether there are ways in which big data technology could preserve privacy by design. Can you collect data at a meaningful level, while never collecting anything individual? These cameras are not an ultimate solution, but looking at lower-tech devices may be a way of finding technologies inherently forgetful or negligent of what we don’t need for study purposes, or of what we want to preserve as part of a personal domain.” But there’s a further twist. It’s doubtful any of the Century images will even reach fruition. The cameras are simply constructed so as to reduce risk of mechanical fault, yet many will still fail. Some will be lost, others vandalised, stolen or waterlogged. Some will never even begin their exposure, being treasured away as keepsakes instead, while others will succumb to the demolition and construction processes they are intended to document. A select few – perhaps the most expertly secreted – may simply expose until whiteout, their owners having failed to pass on their location. “I think it is absolutely essential that one or more of these pictures could end up in 100 years on
Participants will need to nominate a successor. It will fall to as-yet-unborn children to retrieve the cameras, return them to the gallery (if it still exists), extract the images, and collect the deposits (if the Euro hasn’t collapsed). collapsed). “When you enter this space of absurdity, nothing is quite as it should be,” says Keats, “and everything is up for debate.” Provocation abounds in the Century Camera, a surveillance tool of another variety to CCTV. Rather than enforce traditional societal power structures, the cameras question them. Dependent on placement, they will report on the actions of the state and big business – the rise and fall of skyscrapers, the creation or razing of neighbourhoods – while failing to capture anything of citizens’ daily actions. It’s as close as you may get to an objective portrait of Berlin, albeit one welded together from 100 subjective viewpoints. Given current fears over indiscriminate collection of data and the actions of organs such as the NSA (it should not escape notice that the project coincides with the German state opening investigations into claims US intelligence bugged Chancellor Angela Merkel’s telephone), Keats’s absurdism becomes social critique. “The conversation we have about surveillance in the world today
the walls of a gallery, but it is of no importance to me whether they do,” says Keats. “I think the more profound picture that comes out of this project is its collective interpretation of the city and society.” In this spirit, Keats will now expand the scheme to other cities. But he hopes UNESCO might eventually take the cameras on, distributing them to newborn children in such numbers that the chances of finished images would rise dramatically. “Even if 98.999 per cent of the cameras perished, you’d still have numbers large enough that some come through,” he says. “I’ve done this in a preliminary prototype way to date, but I’m leaving it to others to figure out what it can become. If we had a visual link between generations – a situation where, every day, 100-year pictures are coming in – that would become something very powerful.”
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Oli Stratford is the deputy editor of Disegno.