Every time I'm in a cab in New York and my friends and I go by the mysterious number ticker that overlooks Union Square we shout over eachother to try to guess what the giant, rapidly-ticking, in the trillions number means. We used to think it was counting down until the millennium...but that came and went. Actual deaths in Iraq? Nahh way too high. Number of Starbucks locations? Probably not. Earth's orbital odometer? No clue. National deficit? Cost of the war? No one, not any of the natives or tourists that I talked to had any idea...and it's been there since 1999. What did any of you think it was?
Well, I finally found out, after years. It's a clock- duh! It's actually an atomic clock called Metronome. From the left, it tells the time since midnight, and read backwards from the right it tells the time until midnight. Exactly at noon, the clock would read 1200000000000012.
Anyway, what I thought was interesting about this "mystery" is the visual rhetoric behind it. When I saw a crazy-big number constantly ticking in the middle of New York city, it persuaded me to think about serious issues, I thought was something scandalous, and assumed it was that it was trying to get me to think about something important. My friends and I automatically thought about war, death, debt, when in actuality it was simply the time.
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3 comments:
That's so funny, because I would've thought the exact same thing at first, that it had to be tallying up some monumental figure about deaths, and that it was some powerful message that is supposed to persuade us all into some kind of positive action. I think we're so used to being bombarded with advertisements from TV, internet, billboards, etc., that we just come to expect that they're trying to sell us something powerful and thought provoking. But in reality, they're just telling us the time of day!
I think such a response says a lot about the collective state-of-mind in America right now, and I would guess it has as much, if not more, to do with the onslaught of world news as it does with advertising and entertainment. You can't access the internet or watch T.V. without being reminded of the mounting death toll in Iraq, or the astronomical deficit, or the number of children without health insurance. Since 9/11, the social and political climate in the U.S. has been marked by fear, apprehension, and an increasing distrust in the judgment of our leaders. This might be a bit bleak, but I think we've become a cynical nation, and I think it's no wonder--we've been trained to expect the worst.
It's things like this clock that really entertain me. This specific item is a really cool marriage of functionality (it's a clock) and and abstract art (form of the clock). It's a rare thing to get people to think-evidence of pretty effective visual rhetoric. There definitely seems to be shared collective though(s) about this object due to current events. I'd be interested to know when this was created, and maybe what people thought about it at the time. Just as with any abstract art piece, with time the interpretations of this clock will change as well. It's interesting to think what this could have meant to people in the past, and also what it could mean to people in the near future. Maybe it'll be seen as a death toll or countdown on the war in Iran. I hope not.
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