Links

time within context

    No idea, no plan, no action is taken without connection to the past. Sometimes subliminal, sometimes a acknowledged, and sometimes a parody, the past informs and deeps our appreciation for the time ahead. TiWalkMe arose from two decades of thinking about the limits of human imagination and experience. These links, while not originally connected to those years, are shared to provide context for a visitor new to “deep” time.

Art and the Landscape

• Perhaps the most creative and empowering reinvention of an abandoned industrial site is the Park Duisburg Nord in Duisburg, Germany by Latz + Partner. Blast furnaces into fjords, slag heaps into wildflower nurseries, roads into brooks.
• Andy Goldsworthy brilliantly incorporates natural materials into stunning, but ephemeral, sculpture. Treasure his book Time (Harry N Abrams, 2000 ISBN 0-8109-4482-0)
• Ancient intaglios and geoglyphs, best seen from the air or an adjacent mountain top
• A 500 acre park at Storm King, dotted with paths, vistas and post-WWII sculpture emerging from the soil.
• The Fresh Kills sanitary landfill in New York is slated for an artistic conversion from landfill to landscape.
• Agnes Denes designed a conical hill in Finland, planted with 10,000 trees by 10,000 people in a great double spiral.
• A thoughtful review of “reclamation art” by Hilary Anne Frost-Kumpf (link now broken).
• The Eco-cathedral in the Netherlands
• The NYC High Line, a park developed on an abandoned elevated rail.

Ancient Gardens and Parks

• The Persian Paradise Garden places heaven at its center, with paths and water running North, South, East and West. Generally walled, highly symmetrical, filled with trees and plants and truly a heaven on earth.
• The Generalife palace and gardens in the Alhambra- a Moorish interpretation of the Paradise Garden.
• The Chinese Garden is a marvel of perspective and introspection, weaving a miniature and idealized representation of the world into the smallest courtyard.
• Central Park, New York – a vibrant example of a “naturalized” setting in an urban environment designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.

Other Deep Time and Ancient Clocks

• The National Institute of Standards- home of the most accurate clock in the world, maintains a fine site on the history of time keeping- curiously (and coincidentally) call a “Walk in Time”
• The Horological Society of NY offers a wonderful video lecture by William Andrewes on mechanical clocks through the ages. Also in Scientific American.
• The Shrine at Ise in Japan is rebuilt every 20 years, counting out the decades since 692 CE. The building, while neither tree nor forest, is a representation of a sacred plant. The Shrine is living proof that communities can nurture such deep time clocks.
• The horologium florae, or clock garden. Originally suggested by Linnaeus, the clock face is planted by different species of flowers that bloom at sequential hours throught the day.
• The “Long Now Foundation” is building a mechanical clock to span the millennia. An example of mankind confusing the measurement of time with internalizing time scales, but the foundation is motivated by some important goals and backers.
• In addition to other speculative uses, Stonehenge may be a clock.
• Athanasius Kircher, a 1600’s Jesuit scholar and polymath, proposed using phototropism in a sunflower as a clock.
• Other than marking time slowly with the heavens, intra-day clocks are a recent invention- probably only five millennia old. A wonderful water clock, operated only by gravity, surface tension and pendulum is the work of Bernard Gitton. See one of his clocks installed at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.
• TiWalkMe turns distance into time. Yet others turn time into distance. For example, the University of Maine stretched the solar system out along a major highway for hundreds of miles, in a multi-county scale model of the solar system. A drive between planets might take an hour, yet each planet could fit easily within a summer gazebo.
• The Letters of Utrecht, sequential letters embedded in pavement that gradually reveal a poem. One letter a week.
• 7000 Oaks planted in Kassel, Germany. A random walk calendar.

Suggestions for other related links? Our email address is on the volunteer page.

We’ll add new links where space and relevancy permits.