Composer Hiroya Miura has created “Lightmotif”: a musical soul-shaking for the new solar cycle as part of the Make Music Winter Festival. On December 21 in Long Island City brass musicians will march while playing a call-and-answer pattern following the path of the Long Island City Sundial. The musicians will march in a line tracing the shadow of the gnomon in different times of the day, while attentively tuning into the brightness of their surroundings and street sound. Join in as audience or participant (brass musicians welcome)–more information here.

Thanks to Hiroya Miura for this excellent celebration of the Solstice and the LIC Sundial!

Chris McCaw, Sunburned GSP#114(Arizona), 2007. 8″x10″ unique gelatin silver paper negative
private collection

Chris McCaw, Sunburned GSP#400(Pacific Ocean), 2009. 4-8″x10″ unique gelatin silver paper negatives.
private collection

The dominating feature of the clock is a sculpture of a devouring metal insect which looks like a grasshopper or locust. The sculpture is actually the clock’s escapement. Taylor calls this beast the Chronophage (literally “time eater”, from the Greek). It moves its mouth, appearing to “eat up” the seconds as they pass, and occasionally it “blinks”. The creature’s constant motion produces an eerie grinding sound that suits its task. The hour is tolled by the sound of a chain clanking into a small wooden coffin hidden in the back of the clock.

Below the clock is an inscription mundus transit et concupiscentia eius (“the world passeth away, and the lust thereof”).

Conceived as a work of public art, the Chronophage reminds viewers in a dramatic way of the inevitable passing of time. Taylor deliberately designed it to be “terrifying”: “Basically I view time as not on your side. He’ll eat up every minute of your life, and as soon as one has gone he’s salivating for the next.” Others have described it as “hypnotically beautiful and deeply disturbing”.

More info: YouTube video explaining clock, chronophage website, and conspiracy theorists.

“The author points out that in ‘environmental art’ (also called ‘public art’) artists must take into account not only their individual artistic desires but also the reactions of the general public. He finds that he has accomplished this by means of his large-scale events that are based on the theme of the sundial. He hopes that the public, attraced by the funcitional character of the sundial, will obtain aethetic satisfaction from the artistic aspects of the events and also see the surrounding environments in a new way.

“He describes a number of sundial events that he has produced or propoed, some of which make use of exisiting city buildings and monuments as gnomons. He has also made sundial sculptures and proposed a design for a sundial fountain.”

An inspiration for Andrewes’ Longitude Dial was a 1610 map by Nuremberg mathematician Franz Ritter (below, thanks Smithsonian website). It placed his city at the center, so that the meridians of longitude emanating from the North Pole could also serve as the hour lines of a Nuremberg sundial.

Article on Andrewes by Dana Sobel at Smithsonian.com

Using a complex array of perforations, the One Day Poem Pavilion‘s surface allows light to pass through creating shifting patterns, which–during specific times of the year–transform into the legible text of a poem. The specific arrangements of the perforations reveal different shadow-poems according to the solar calendar.

Timeplace incorporates a huge sundial on top of the skyscraper so that the sundial’s shadow falls across the building’s cylindrical shape, allowing the time to be seen from miles away and from everywhere within the Marina.

(thanks to flickr mad short chick for image)