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"Millennium Camera" to take a 1,000-year long-exposure photo

What did the spot of land you’re currently on look like 1,000 years ago? Well, people in the year 3023 might have the luxury of finding out, thanks to an art/science project called the Millennium Camera, which will take an extremely long-exposure photo of the Arizona desert.

The brainchild of Jonathon Keats, an experimental philosopher at the University of Arizona College of Fine Arts, the Millennium Camera is an intriguing experiment with a noble, if somewhat naive, goal. Sunlight seeps through that hole and shines on a light-sensitive surface at the back, which has been coated in multiple thin layers of an oil paint pigment called rose madder. Or even if it does survive, the experiment’s purpose could simply be lost to time, leaving our distant descendants scratching their space helmeted heads over an underwhelming image of abstract art.

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