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September 23, 2020 02:10 pm

A New York Clock That Told Time Now Tells the Time Remaining

For more than 20 years, Metronome, which includes a 62-foot-wide 15-digit electronic clock that faces Union Square in Manhattan, has been one of the city's most prominent and baffling public art projects. Its digital display once told the time in its own unique way, counting the hours, minutes and seconds (and fractions thereof) to and from midnight. But for years observers who did not understand how it worked suggested that it was measuring the acres of rainforest destroyed each year, tracking the world population or even that it had something to do with pi. On Saturday Metronome adopted a new ecologically sensitive mission. From a report: Now, instead of measuring 24-hour cycles, it is measuring what two artists, Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd, present as a critical window for action to prevent the effects of global warming from becoming irreversible. On Saturday at 3:20 p.m., messages including "The Earth has a deadline" began to appear on the display. Then numbers -- 7:103:15:40:07 -- showed up, representing the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds until that deadline. As a handful of supporters watched, the number -- which the artists said was based on calculations by the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Berlin -- began ticking down, second by second. "This is our way to shout that number from the rooftops." Mr. Golan said just before the countdown began. "The world is literally counting on us." The Climate Clock, as the two artists call their project, will be displayed on the 14th Street building, One Union Square South, through Sept. 27, the end of Climate Week. The creators say their aim is to arrange for the clock to be permanently displayed, there or elsewhere. Mr. Golan said he came up with the idea to publicly illustrate the urgency of combating climate change about two years ago, shortly after his daughter was born. He asked Mr. Boyd, an activist from the Lower East Side, to work with him on the project.

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