I’ll Always Have Time For You

In Toronto, all the parking meters do double-duty as public clocks. Our major streets are lined with green machines that tell The Time. They don’t tell atomic time, and if the numbers on their little LCD screens are not scientifically precise, it is merely bureaucratic time. The same is true for the larger public clocks that loom over cities, from the clock in Grand Central Station to the horrid Olympic Countdown clock in Vancouver BC.

But time need not be such an absolute thing. Think of farmers in Saskatchewan who eschew daylight savings time because they get up when the sun rises, regardless of what time it is; a recent episode of Radiolab featured the “bird clock” of Papua New Guiea–the simple idea that you can determine the time of day by what birds you can hear.

We urban dwellers may have our own subtle reminders that the day is passing, like the university students who flood the streets every hour on the ten-past, the sound of kids playing in the park when it’s noontime recess, or the cabs that line up outside of clubs on Saturday nights, implying that some people will be heading home soon.

Mostly though, we run by the clocks that are on our wrists and our cell phones, and the public clocks and the subways schedules and the strangers we stop of the street and ask “do you have the time?” All these times are slightly different from each other, and each is equally correct to the person who is run by that clock.

I’ll Always Have Time For You is an outdoor installation of a plethora of clocks–as many as can be collected from garage sales and thrift stores and dollar stores and freecycle–that invites passers by to set one or more clocks to the time they carry. This gives the public the opportunity to influence the public presentation of time, and allows us to create a more collective understanding of what time it is. The clocks will tell us a range of times, and if Conflux participants have come from different time zones but not yet changed their clocks, there will be some distinct abberations in the fuzzy time that is being told.

This telling of time will be like telling a story, the story of those that participate in the urban space, not the municipal bureaucrats who set the official clocks. I’ll Always Have Time For You is a simple act of resistance against the rigid structures that organize our time–by changing the time, we change the city.

The Olympics Countdown Clock in Vancouver

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Interesting things about time

• The Flower Clock Garden–By making observations of the times when flowers open and close during the day, Carolus Linnaeus conceived the idea of arranging certain plants in an order of flowering, so that they constituted a kind of floral clock.
• Radiolab Episode about Time–talks about the Bird Clock, and many other things.

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