The Long Now is a phrase coined by Brian Eno for a sense of the present stretched across thousands of years, and the name of the San Francisco foundation built around it. Formed in 1996 by the computer scientist Danny Hillis, the writer Stewart Brand, Eno and others, the Long Now Foundation promotes long-term thinking and writes years with five digits, so that 2026 becomes 02026.
Its central project is a mechanical clock designed to run for ten millennia, under construction near Van Horn in west Texas; a prototype is held by the Science Museum in London. Eno shaped its voice. He created ten bells and asked Hillis for an algorithm that would ring them in a different sequence every day for ten thousand years, then released synthesised studies of those chimes as January 07003: Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now in 2003. The project remains one of the clearest bridges between generative music, ritual bell-ringing and very long time.