2 . The year 2114 will be an eventful one for art.In May of that year in Berlin,the philosopher-artist Jonathon Keats’“century cameras”-cameras with a 100-year-long exposure time-will be retrieved from hiding places around the city to have their results developed and exhibited.Six months after that,the Future Library in Oslo,Norway,will open its doors for the first time,presenting 100 books printed on the wood of trees in the distant past of 2014.

As Katie Paterson,the creator of the Future Library,puts it:“Future Library is an artwork for future generations.”These projects,more than a century in the making,are part of a new way of“slow art”intended to push viewers and participants to think beyond their own lifetimes.They aim to challenge today’s short-term thinking and the brief attention spans of modern consumers,forcing people into considering works more deliberately.In their way,too,they are fighting against modern culture-not just regarding money but also the way in which artistic worth is measured by attention.

In a similar fashion,every April on Slow Art Day,visitors are encouraged to stare at five works of art for 10 minutes at a time-a tough ask for the average museum visitor,who typically spends less than 30 seconds on each piece of art.

Like the Future Library,the century cameras are very much a project for cities,since it’s in cities that time runs fastest and the pace of life is fastest.“Since I started living in a city,I’ve somehow been quite disconnected,”Anne Beate Hovind,the Future Library project manager,who described how working on the library drew her back to the pace of life she knew when she was growing up on a farm in her youth,told The Atlantic magazine.

Works like Future Library and the century cameras raise all sorts of questions.Will any of the cameras survive?Will any of Future Library works be any good?What will future generations make of century art,and will they see it as the gift that it’s intended to be?More specifically,for those of us struggling with“a crisis of attention”,the question seems to be:How can we adopt this attitude now,in everyday life?When we struggle to look up from our mobile phones,how can we look beyond the present moment and think broadly and generously across time?