Metronome in its early days as an inscrutable public clock.

Metronome

New York, New York

Metronome is a good example of why conceptual artists rarely get paid to design public clocks. Big and strange, Metronome is over a hundred feet high and fills the outside wall of a building that faces Union Square. Plumes of white steam occasionally puff out of a hole ("The Infinity") at the center of a bulls-eye of 24 carat gold-covered bricks ("The Vortex"), topped by a giant hand ("The Relic"), none of which has much to do with telling time -- except for the puffs, which are especially big at noon and midnight.

For decades the clock part of Metronome was "The Passage," fifteen big digital numbers that ticked with atomic precision -- to a hundredth of a second -- if you knew how to read their maddening mix of military time and backwards numbers. At precisely quarter to three in the afternoon, for example, they would display 144500000001509. And if you were walking past and saw 200658907015303, you would of course know that it was just shy of 8:07 in the evening.

It's doubtful that many New Yorkers ever realized that Metronome was a clock, even though it had been been ticking away since 1999. So in 2020 the artists changed the digital display into an easy-to-read countdown, showing the years, days, and hours that humanity has left before climate change becomes irreversible.