Terrakino requires us to have the faith that it can endure;
that our sucessors will support it.  It cannot ever reach its meager goal without
a group of people, scattered across space and time,
making a committment to a product they may never see.
This is a compelling analog of the fate of our COLLECTIVE LIFE.

This project is interesting not only from aesthetic, philosophical and technical points of view, but the absolute necessity of constructing an ongoing community, that will need to transcend any single individual’s effort or vision, is quite poignant to us.  We have wanted to make these movies for many decades, and yet saw that the technology of exposing light sensitive film in a mechanical camera, retrieving and archiving it, would be too expensive and cumbersome to sustain. Today with inexpensive high resolution digital imaging and global networks with the bandwidth and capacity to collect and store such images, we are finally in a position to begin this long and lovely process.

To begin to collect effective results, as many sites and subjects as possible should be set up. Some might not provide decent material for many decades, but others, such as the growth of a tree, or the movement of a glacier, could produce compelling footage in a few years. These rapid return sites should of course be the first online, and will be essential to demonstrate the concept, and develop the base necessary to build interest and inertia over the long term, which we hope may be sustained for centuries.

A website needs to be constructed to facilitate the collection and storage of the images. The website will also make the individual images and developing footage available to the public, as well as serving as the organizational medium by which the maintenance and upgrading of the image library and the equipment can be scheduled and delegated. It must also form the locus of the virtual and otherwise community that will be needed to sustain the social infrastructure that will be required to keep the movies growing.