Slow Emotion was presented at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in the framework of a series of lectures on emotion in art. Departing from the notion of the Sublime described by the English philosopher and politician Edmund Burke, the lecture addresses manifestations of deep emotion and awe, both on a personal and collective level.

1. SLOW
EMOTION
Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten / Royal Academy of Art - Den Haag / The Hague
Studium Generale, May 4th, 2010

2. AWE
SUBLIME
&
BEAUTIFUL

3. Jacques Tourneur
I Walked With A Zombie
1943
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8PUsose3kE

4. 4
Jacques Tourneur- I Walked With A Zombie, 1943

5. Edmund Burke
1729-1797

6. A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY
INTO THE ORIGIN OF OUR IDEAS
OF
THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL
WITH SEVERAL OTHER ADDITIONS
Edmund Burke
1757

7. Part II, Sect. I: Of the Passion Caused by the Sublime
The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those
causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment
is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with
some degree of horror.
In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot
entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which
employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far
from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and
hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is
the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are
admiration, reverence, and respect.

8. Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
T.S. Eliot - Ash Wednesday

9. Chris Marker
La Jetée, ciné-roman
1962
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xz5cs_la-jetee-1962_creation

10. Chris Marker - La Jetée, 1962

11. Sequoia AD 590-1891 - American Museum for Natural History, New York City

12. Part II, Sect. VII - Vastness
(...) as the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme
of littleness is in some measure sublime likewise: when we attend to
the infinite divisibility of matter, when we pursue animal life into
these excessively small, and yet organized beings, that escape the
nicest inquisition of the sense; when we push our discoveries yet
downward, and consider those creatures so many degrees yet
smaller, and the still diminishing scale of existence, in tracing which
the imagination is lost as well as the sense; we become amazed and
confounded at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in
its effects this extreme of littleness from the vast itself. For division
must be infinite as well as addition; because the idea of a perfect
unity can no more be arrived at, than that of a complete whole, to
which nothing may be added.

13. Charles & Ray Eames
Powers of Ten, 1977
A film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe
and the effect of adding another zero
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGAEru1AJb0

14. SLOW
EMOTION
collective emotion

15. Ise Shrine / Ise Jingû
AD 685 ->

16. Part II, Sect. I: Magnitude in Building
To the sublime in building, greatness of dimension seems requisite;
for on a few parts, and those small, the imagination cannot rise to
any idea of infinity. No greatness in the manner can effectually
compensate for the want of proper dimensions. There is no danger
of drawing men into extravagant designs by this rule; it carries its
own caution along with it. Because too great a length in buildings
destroys the purpose of greatness, which it was intended to promote.

17. Ise Shrine (685->), gate, of torii

18. 18
Ise Shrine (685->), plan

19. 19
Ise Shrine (685->), double plot

20. 20
Ise Shrine (685->)

21. 21
Ise Shrine (685->)

22. the clock of the long now
a.k.a.
The 10,000 Year Clock
The Long Now Foundation 22

23. ANTICIPATORY
DESIGN
SCIENCE
23

25. Olaf Stapledon - Manuscript timeline for his novel Last and First Men, A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930)

26. 26

27. main dial
*
5 digit year
*
horizons
*
sun, moon
*
stars
equation
normal of time cam
clock dial
binary
mechanical
computer
not shown:
torsional drive rewind spirals
pendulum speed governor
27
drive weghts

28. 28
Clock of the Long Now - Time Equation Scan Component

29. We will describe what we currently hope to be the experience of the full-size Clock/Library complex.
You exit your vehicle in a parking area at the base of a mountain somewhere in the high desert of the
Southwest United States. Looking up, you see a flight of shallow steps, each step carved from a layer
of rock representing approximately 10,000 years of geologic time. After climbing 100 of these steps, or
one million years into the future, you are somewhat awed and belittled by the greatness of geologic time.
You arrive at a flat knoll where you see a cave ahead.
Through the opening of the cave you see some large but slow movement. You proceed and gradually
make out a giant pendulum swinging back and forth deep within the cave. Once you reach the center
you realize that you are actually within the clock mechanism itself and you are aware of the pendulum
beating out its 10-second period. You proceed up a spiral staircase that will take you through the
relatively low ceiling and up into the first layer of clock mechanics. On this layer you see the fastest
of the mechanical calculation devices, which ticks once per day. As you go up flight after flight you
see each progressive mechanism with its relative slower tick, the last being the precession of the
equinoxes, a 25,784-year cycle. The next few layers are the abstraction layers that adjust solar time
to actual time and the delay for the pendulum-impulsing mechanism.

30. When you reach the top of the stairs
you are in a huge room several stories tall.
It is dimly lit from a slot cut through the living rock of the mountain on the southern face.
You make out two giant helices, one descending either wall, each being rotated by a falling weight that
must weigh several tons. Then you are surprised by an immediate brightness in the room. It is coming
from the sun that has become directly in line with the slit on the wall. It is reflecting off a hemispherical
mirror lighting up the whole room and heating up a sphere in the center of a great dial.
The heating of this sphere actuates a synchronization mechanism which automatically adjusts the time
of the clock to local noon. You are able to make out the dial around this sphere, now showing you the
year 11,567. You then look at the rings in from this to find images you recognize of the Sun and Moon
in their current phases, as well as a diagramof the current night sky. From these you are able to work
backward the actual time to your newer an more familiar time scale. But you are struck that the people
of this ancient time had the foresight to think this far into their future and create this place.

31. The heating of this sphere actuates a synchronization mechanism which automatically adjusts the time
of the clock to local noon. You are able to make out the dial around this sphere, now showing you the
year 11,567. You then look at the rings in from this to find images you recognize of the Sun and Moon
in their current phases, as well as a diagram of the current night sky. From these you are able to work
backward the actual time to your newer an more familiar time scale. But you are struck the the people
of this ancient time had the foresight to think this far into their future and create this place.
At this point you wander through the rest of this facility to find a library and people accessing and
preserving the data stored there. Akin to the truly ancient library of Alexandria, there is a constant
forward migration of the data to increasingly better and denser methods of storage. In the main vault
you find the original 1,000 books stored at the impossibly large scale of 100 NM pixels. These were the
first 1,000 books stored in the Clock/Library chosen by its founders. although not necessarily relevant to
your time, what they began helped to teach people the value of knowledge over long periods of time.
Without it humanity might have obsolesced itself out of
existence without being able to look over the ancient
records of the sea and air and find trends that are only
apparent over centuries or millennia.

32. 32
Mount Washington, Eastern Nevada

33. Part IV, Sect. XI: The Artificial Infinite
We have observed, that a species of greatness arises from the
artificial infinite; and that this infinite consists in an uniform
succession of great parts: we observed, too, that the same
uniform succession had a like power in sounds. But because
the effects of many things are clearer in one of the senses
than in another, and that all the senses bear analogy to and
illustrate one another, I shall begin with this power in
sounds, as the cause of the sublimity from succession is
rather more obvious in the sense of hearing. And I shall here,
once for all, observe, that an investigation of the natural and
mechanical causes of our passions, besides the curiosity of
the subject, gives, if they are discovered, a double strength
and lustre to any rules we deliver on such matters.

34. Brian Eno
JANUARY 07003
Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now

37. fin
www.slideshare.net/rvtienhoven