Phillip Raiford Johnson

Running Clock, by Phillip Raiford Johnson

Artsist's statement: 
Time and space are not fixed quantities. In the discovery, or rather formulating of the ‘general theory of relativity’ in 1915, Einstein painted a very different picture of these two concepts and indeed of reality as we know it. This theory still stands to be corrected and as technology allows us to peer further into the abyss, literally and figuratively, it seems that the general theory of relativity is only gaining in credibility. At the risk of being boring and offending Einstein with the brevity of my interpretation, here is a summary of the theory and its implications for us.

Firstly, this theory requires that we relinquish our ideas of absolute space or rather an absolute position of rest. For instance if you visit the JAG today and visit it again tomorrow, common sense would say you visit the same point in space, but in fact the earth has moved and JAG is not the same co-ordinate in the universe anymore. One can then imagine the implication of trying to measure anything (eg. Time) against the non-existent ‘absolute position of rest’.

Next it is instrumental to understand the history around the measurement of speed of light. ‘Light’ is actually another word for the frequency of electro-magnetic waves, from radio waves to gamma rays, the only difference is the frequency. 

We would expect the measurement of the speed of light then to be relative to our point or direction and speed, moving through space. Strangely enough though, this was not the case with numerous experiments conducted around the speed of light. The speed of light is the same for all freely moving observers in space. 

We know speed is the measurement of distance covered in a certain time, for example, ‘kilometers per hour’. In the case of the speed of light, speed is constant, but in measuring it, if two observers cannot agree on the distance it traveled (because there is no absolute space), then it means there cannot be a consistent time either. Therefore, there is no ‘absolute time’. Time is particular to every freely moving observer.

We can see then that the ‘general theory of relativity’ disproves our conventional notions of time and space and binds them to each other inextricably to give us something new called ‘space-time’. This is seen as a four-dimensional quantity (latitude, longitude, height, and time). Space-time is a ‘substance’ that our universe exists within. Furthermore, space-time is not flat, it is curved. As Stephen Hawkings explains, “Bodies like the earth are not made to move on curved orbits by a force called gravity; instead, they follow the nearest thing to a straight path in a curved space… In general relativity, bodies always follow straight lines in four-dimensional space-time, but they nevertheless appear to us to move along curved paths in our three-dimensional space. (This is rather like watching an airplane flying over hilly ground. Although it follows astraight line in three-dimensional space, its shadow follows a curved path on the two-dimensional ground.)” (20:1988).

Furthermore, “Space and time not only affect but also are affected by everything that happens in the universe” (21:1988).

This might seem like it has no bearing on our daily reality, but take for instance the fact that when mass (and therefore gravity) is increased, time runs slower. Satellites controlling GPS systems here on the surface of the earth have to be recalibrated with the time on the ground every day because they occupy a space where time actually moves faster due to their distance from earth and its gravity. Because of this discrepancy they can go off by about 11 miles a day (in gps co-ordinates) if they aren’t reset.

Time itself runs slightly slower in Capetown than what it does in Johannesburg because of the altitude (a discrepancy which I think is aptly exaggerated by the character of both cities).

‘Running Clock’ is a blunt illustration of how time is related to space. It counts up like a stopwatch and when the motion sensor detects the viewer’s presence in the space it is reset to zero and begins to count up again. Thus there is a relationship between the physical space a person occupies and the time on the clock (or rather the time at that event). This function also serves to undermine our notion of absolute time by using the quantity of time to only describe the time since it was last reset, something which the viewer is hardly given time to realize before it resets again. This renders it kind of useless and the monumentality of the work belies that function. Clocks like this are usually calibrated to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to the millisecond and have important functions in places like train stations where time has an almost physical quality due to its importance in that setting. It also reminds me of the monumental clocks that seem to countdown to important things like worldcups.

The title refers to the monotony of the function and possibly our general perception of how time works (hourglasses, grains of sand and all that) and is a reference to the ‘runny clocks’ in the paintings of Dali which I think are quite a blunt metaphor for the physical and malleable quality of time, something we know to be reality thanks to the general theory of relativity. Dali was actually on the money.