Artist Jonathan Keats has come up with an interesting variation on the "century cam" concept: keep the shutter open.

Starting Wednesday, a specially-built camera and specially-designed film will be opened in a hotel room in San Francisco; the exposure will last a hundred years, until August 3, 2105.

During that period, an estimated 12,000 couples will pass through the room, but Mr. Keats isn't interested in any of them. "People are incidental," he says. "Eventually they all die. And I don't have any interest in taking portraits. What I'm trying to document is history, in order to get a picture of time itself."

Mr. Keats calls his camera a continuous time capsule.

Hopefully the hotel (Hotel des Arts, in downtown San Francisco) is built well enough to withstand the size 8+ earthquake very likely to happen in the region during this century.