Observational Time with John Goodman

Here's an interesting article from the Long Now Blog.

John Goodman is an engineer that admires intuition, a reluctant artist who enjoys elegant approximations. His best known creation,
The Annosphere, was recently showcased at the Cambridge Science Festival in Massachusetts, where he lives and works.



The Annosphere is emblematic of what Mr. Goodman calls an intuitive grasp of time – time that is told by instinct, season and cultural benchmark, rather than being parceled out in minutes and seconds. He tells an illustrative story: Once, in a hotel in Europe, he noticed that the shower knob was demarcated in degree readings. He got to musing on the fact that he had no idea, in degrees, how hot he liked his shower. “The shower had degree readings on the knob, but who knows the exact temperature they like their shower? The right way to set a shower is where it’s comfortable, the right way to measure time is the same.”



From the Annosphere website:
Time goes both too slowly and too quickly. From one minute to the next, nothing seems any different and yet before you know it, the day is over, the summer’s gone to fall, adolescence turns to middle age, and you’re in the nursing home.

The annosphere tells time, but more usefully, it presents time. It shows you sunrise and sunset, the start of spring and the winter solstice. It lets you see on your desk what you can’t see in the world: the steady pace of time, the subtle day to day changes in sunlight and shadow, the cycles that run through each year.

Cuckoos in the Arts

Followers of North Coast Imports know that we are pleased as punch to be introducing an entirely new line of cuckoo clocks in our /design series. These clocks are a marriage of fine tradition with fine arts (and design). We are even planning an ancillary exhibition tour of artworks by the Black Forest artists who are responsible for creating these clocks.



It's good to see that we are not alone in creating a body of artistic work centered around the cuckoo clock. I recently read about The Bird House, a one-act play by Kate Marks receiving its world premiere at Theatre Three.



"The play's action begins in a brightly colored tree house in a land called The Bright Side where Louisy (Cotton Wright) and Syl (Christina Shipp) live in a sheltered ignorance that is decidedly not bliss. Initially, the primary source of their anxiety is that the two birds in their cuckoo clock (named "Cuck" and "Koo") can't be made to stay any longer than it takes for them to sound each hour. Soon, pretty bluebirds are crashing into their windows and ants are marching into the house. The girls can't shut themselves off from the world. Syl eventually leaves for The Lop Side, encountering a war-torn landscape and learning as many life lessons as Louisy, who is left behind in the tree house."

I'm sorry I'll miss the play!

[via TheaterMania]

The Bunny Project

This is even cuter, if not a little dangerous.

"Performance commissioned by Kalmar Museum of Art, Sweden. During the inauguration of the new art museum in Kalmar a suspicious individual sneaked around the premises mounting sculptures made of carrots, alarm clocks, red and blue cables, metal wire and tape. On direct orders from the Swedish secret police the performance was stopped since the Culture Minister refused to give her inaugural speech if it were to continue. The speech , as it later turned out, was about how art must be allowed to be free and provocative."



via [Bunny Project]