
Jonathon Keats, Anne Heggli, & Adam Csank
Elders of Time: Art & Science with the Bristlecones
Join us for an evening dedicated to Long Now’s Nevada Bristlecone Preserve, featuring the debut of our documentary Elders of Time alongside presentations by Anne Heggli, Jonathon Keats, and Adam Csank.
The event marks the premiere of Elders of Time, a short film documenting Jonathon Keats’ installation, Centuries of the Bristlecone, currently located at the Preserve.
Our featured speakers will explore the intersection of art and science:
- Jonathon Keats, artist and conceptual philosopher, will introduce "Bristlecone time." He will discuss this tree-calibrated temporal standard and how it exposes the limitations of Universal Standard Time.
- Anne Heggli, Long Now Research Fellow, will share insights from ten years of high-frequency climate monitoring on Nevada’s Mount Washington. Her work bridges modern data collection with the 5,000-year natural records kept by the bristlecone pines.
- Adam Csank, paleoclimatologist and dendrochronologist, will examine the science of bristlecone growth rates. He will outline his new long-term studies at the Preserve designed to support the ongoing Centuries of the Bristlecone project.
bio
Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer and experimental philosopher. His conceptually-driven transdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities. He has exhibited and lectured at dozens of institutions worldwide, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Stanford University to the Triennale di Milano, and from SXSW to CERN to UNESCO. He is the author of six books on subjects ranging from science and technology to art and design – most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future, published by Oxford University Press – and is the author of a weekly online art and design column for Forbes. He has been an artist-in residence at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics, UC Berkeley's Sagehen Creek Field Station, and the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, a Black Mountain College Legacy Fellow at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, an Imaginary Fellow at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, and a Research Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment. He is currently a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, a visiting scholar at San Jose State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, a research fellow at the Highland Institute, a consulting philosopher at Earth Law Center, a Polar Lab artist at the Anchorage Museum, a Flux Exchange Artist at Flux Projects, and an artist-in-residence at Hyundai, the SETI Institute, and UC San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. He co-directs the Center for Climate-Adapted Heritage Cuisine and serves as curatorial director of the Museum of Future History.
Anne Heggli is a passionate snow, water, and climate scientist focused on improving observational methods and actionable environmental data. Her work focuses on long-term monitoring of mountain hydro/biosphere systems that informs the understanding of larger scale processes and water resources. Her entrepreneurial background in international weather monitoring, hardware development, and sensor systems consulting has perfectly prepared her to advance practical climate and weather research in the academic and public agency space. Anne is also a research scientist at the Desert Research Institute, and completed her Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her peer-reviewed work has been published in iScience, the Earth and Space Science Open Archive, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and Western Snow Conference Proceedings. She has presented at the Southern California Academy of Sciences, the North America MtnClim Conference, Ecological Society of America, the California Cooperative Snow Survey Conference, the Airborne Snow Observatories Workshop, and the International Atmospheric River Conference. Anne has been awarded previous Fellowships by the Nevada NASA Space Grant and Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, and is a Graduate Dean’s Merit Scholar at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Adam Csank is a paleoclimatologist and paleoecologist with expertise in stable isotope geochemistry and dendrochronology. His primary research involves the use of stable isotope dendrochronology to reconstruct past climates and the impacts of climate change on trees over time periods ranging from the Pliocene to the present. Csank also works at the intersection of human and physical geography in the growing area of critical physical geography using historic timbers to study legacies of exploitation related to the timber trade. Csank also works to understand historic land use patterns and to find novel ways to use paleodata to inform climate adaptation by understanding risk, vulnerability and resiliency. Past projects include studies ranging from climate reconstructions to land use change to studies of drought and tree mortality. Ongoing projects include reconstructions of climate and ecosystems in the Arctic, the response of trees to climatic change, reconstructions of large-scale atmospheric patterns, streamflow and lake levels and reconstructing historic atmospheric pollution. In his research Dr. Csank has worked in diverse settings both locally and internationally including the Canadian Arctic, Greenland, throughout the western US, eastern Canada, Bermuda, Jamaica and Italy.
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