The Metronome—a 62-foot-wide electronic clock with a 15-digit display facing Manhattan's Union square—has changed its display to the remaining time before the "climate change deadline."
As a public art installation commissioned by real estate firm Related Companies, the Metronome usually counts the hours, minutes, seconds, and fractions of seconds to and from midnight. However, by Saturday, September 19, the electronic clock changed displays to point to the years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds left before the world crosses an irreversible threshold from climate change.
Specifically, the Metronome now displays the time we have left to control our carbon emissions before a designated critical point.
"The Earth has a deadline"
At around 3:20 PM on Saturday, the Metronome started displaying messages such as "The Earth has a deadline." Then, the numbers that formerly followed a 24-hour cycle started changing, later revealed to be the years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds before the carbon emission deadline.
According to the climate deadline artists, Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd, the numbers presented on the giant digital wall clock were based on the estimates made by the team from the Mercator Research Institute of Global Commons and Climate Change. The Berlin, Germany-based institute fosters dialogue about the protection of global commons like the atmosphere and the oceans, and conducts studies on the effect of global warming.
"This is our way to shout that number from the rooftops," Golan said, reported by The New York Times.
Both Boyd and Golan have previously designed similar climate clocks in Berlin as well as in Paris, France. Also, they have made a personal, handheld climate clock for the young Swedish
The artists has also created a personal climate clock for Greta Thunberg, the teenage activist from Sweden, before her appearance last year at the United Nations Climate Action Summit. Thunberg has recently shared a younger photo of her on Twitter, stressing "how fast we're racing in the wrong direction."
This is me at the age of 2 in 2005.
Since then about one third of ALL our fossil fuel CO2 emissions have occurred.
Over half of our CO2 emissions have taken place since 1990.
That sort of gives you an idea of how fast we're racing in the wrong direction.#FaceTheClimateEmergency pic.twitter.com/AzEBPAmVgz — Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) September 20, 2020
Inspired by the Doomsday Clock
Transforming New York City's Metronome into a more environmentally conscious timekeeper was partly influenced by the National Debt Clock in One Bryant Park, Manhattan, and the Doomsday Clock that has been maintained by members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since its conception in 1947.
Boyd and Golan agreed that to get their message across, the timer has to be displayed in a public place, like a statue or an artwork.
"This is arguably the most important number in the world," Boyd told the NY Times, adding that "a monument is often how a society shows what's important, what it elevates, what is at center stage."
The climate deadline artists set their sights on the Metronome, a public art installation originally created by Andrew Ginzel and Kristin Jones that popularly features "The Passage"—an LED display that shows the time in a 24-hour forma. This display includes 2 digits each for the hours, minutes, and seconds, plus one digit for a tenth of a second. The remaining 7 digits display the remaining time in a day.
The Metronome also included a structure that looked like an analog clock, with concentric circles filled with gold flecks. Boyd and Golan offers their explanation for the project, as well as relevant resources about the global carbon emission on their website.
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