The Clock
On the left side of the work is a set of fifteen large LED digits, called "The Passage", which display the time in 24-hour format. The seven leftmost digits show the time in conventional 24-hour format, as hours (2 digits), minutes (2 digits), seconds (2 digits), tenths of a second (1 digit). The seven rightmost digits display the amount of time remaining in a 24-hour day, as tenths of a second (1 digit), seconds (2 digits), minutes (2 digits), hours (2 digits). The center digit represents hundredths of a second, and appears as a blur.
For instance, if the clock reads "195641188180304" (as in the picture at right), it means that time is 19:56 (7:56 PM) and 41.1 seconds, and that there are 04 hours, 03 minutes, and 18.8 seconds remaining in the day. For a few months in 2005, the clock on Metronome did not give the time of day, but instead counted down the time until the International Olympic Committee was to announce the host city of the 2012 Summer Olympics. New York City ultimately lost its bid to be host city to the 2012 Olympics to London.
The clock showed the wrong figures for over a year in 2010/2011 until, in June 2011, the dial-up connection it had previously used to obtain an atomic time reading was updated.
Read more about this topic: Metronome (public Artwork)
Famous quotes containing the word clock:
“We are hardly ever grateful for a fine clock or watch when it goes right, and we pay attention to it only when it falters, for then we are caught by surprise. It ought to be the other way about.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience—it also marks the time, which is four o’clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere.”
—Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816)