Why are artists creating work for an audience that will be born 100 years from now?

One of Jonathon Keats’s hundred pinhole cameras. Photographed by Patrick Chen.

Looking ahead is hard work when the future seems this bleak: superhuman AI threatens to rewrite life as we know it, war and famine are accompanied by a scaling shortage in fuel, global temperatures continue to surge as biodiversity shrinks and urban infrastructure claws into our forest cover. In the worst of times, these long-minded projects dare us to envision more hopeful possibilities.

Take ‘Longplayer’, British musician Jem Finer’s thousand-year-long composition, which has been playing without repetition in a 19th-century lighthouse at London’s Trinity Buoy Wharf since 1999 and will continue until 11.59pm on December 31, 2999. The music, a combination of distinct bell chimes and patterns played on Tibetan singing bowls and composed in real time using an algorithmic function, is ethereal and haunting, as is the message: it is impossible to replay segments or hear the piece in its entirety in a lifespan, but perhaps there is some comfort in knowing others will join us centuries from today to see it through to the end.

Longplayer is Jem Finer’s thousand-year-long musical composition, which began playing at midnight on December 31, 1999. It will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. Photographed by Kristian Buus.

While the art will outlast its artists—here is “the mind alone without corporeal friend”, as Emily Dickinson would say—they would be impossible without generational collaboration. This is perhaps most true in the Dutch city of Utrecht, where a poem is being written one letter at a time since 2012. Every Saturday­ afternoon, a paving stone with a single character of the alphabet, a Scrabble tile of sorts, is installed on a narrow street that runs alongside the city’s old canal. A different poet continues the verse every three years, and so it extends, foot by foot, with whole words emerging in months and sentences in years. “I fell in love with a boy who lived in Utrecht when I came here to study, and although that did not last, I am now in love with the city. I work, live and write here; my children were born here. This poem is a gift to its pub­lic,” confesses Hanneke Van Eijken, the ­ current custodian of ‘The Letters of Utrecht’. The poem is intended to continue without end for as long as there are Saturdays, offering an analogue record of our transforming sensibilities.