Have you seen the Yahoo Time Capsule yet?

From Yahoo: For 30 days, from October 10 until November 8, Yahoo! users worldwide can contribute photos, writings, videos, audio – even drawings – to this electronic anthropology project. This is the first time that digital data will be gathered and preserved for historical purposes…

What will you save and what will you share? Your self-portrait. That home video clip that always makes you smile – or cry. A Top 10 list of predictions for the future. Perhaps the single photograph you could never live without. A list of what makes you angry. A special letter to yourself or to your children – just in case. A special class project. A letter to your lost love or to your boss that you’ll never send. The URL of your favorite blog, web site, or podcast. Perhaps it will be something banal. Perhaps it will be something beautiful. This is your time capsule.

You’ll be part of history and witness what other are saying and saving. You’ll have your handiwork presented to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, projected on one of the most famous relics on the planet, AND then beamed along a path of laser light into space. This will definitely be something to email the grandkids about someday.

Most interesting to me is the design of the digital Time Capsule. Here is a snippet from the artist, Jonathan Harris:

The aesthetic of the Time Capsule is that of a ball of thread, spinning like a globe, its shifting surface entirely composed of words and pictures submitted by people around the world. The thread ball concept relates to threads of memory and threads of time, where threads are taken to be any continuous and self-consistent narrative strand.

When the Time Capsule opens, it displays the 100 most recent contributions, which form the spinning globe. The ten themes orbit the globe in a pinwheel pattern. At any moment, any individual tile can be clicked, causing the globe to fall away and the selected tile to expand, revealing detailed information about the tile and the person who created it.

Using a search interface, viewers can specify the population they wish to see, exploring such demographics as “men in their 20s from New York City”, and “Iraqi women who submitted drawings in response to the question: What do you love?”. There are an infinite number of ways to slice the data, and each resulting slice then becomes its own thread, which can be browsed independently, tile by tile, like a filmstrip.

You can view it here: The Yahoo Time Capsule

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this project…
Will you be participating? Why or why not?

Tags: yahoo, time capsule, digital mosaic, self-expression