Robert Powell: Hall of Hours

Hall of Hours is a multimedia celebration of time and times.

“What then is time?” Saint Augustine, writes, “If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it, I do not know.”

Which could be a good place to stop, yet trying to define time isn’t quite the question this exhibition is interested in. Asking what time is often results in tautologies – time is time, what else? Which is opaque, but has the shimmer of other questions that might be answered – how do we exist in time and how do we experience time. 

Henri Bergson saw a distinction between scientific measurable time and the human experience of it. He also suggested we should be wary of spatial metaphors. When we say time progresses or flows, or if we imagine it as a line, or as an arrow, a circle, or any other shape or having any kind of movement, we are using language to make time like a thing that exists in space and so misrepresenting what time really is, which is independent of time. Yet, this sort of language seems to help us to comprehend time, because somehow, even though time is ever-present, it is, as Saint Augustine complains, very difficult to comprehend head-on. Clocks fascinate because they embody the metaphor of something ineffable. They are time turned into space. They also are objects of great beauty, both intricate and streamlined, informative and mysterious.

My child became interested in clocks when he was nearly one year old. The enthusiasm started with a cuckoo clock and grew to gobble up grandfather clocks, mantle clocks, barometers, church towers, anything with a dial. Anything circular really, he’d get into a merry flap about. 

When I became a parent, I discovered how much a child is like a human clock. Each passing day is visible on their newborn features. I found my life rescheduled to the time kept by this clock, to the tick of its appetites and moods. Every scrap of time became charged with significance. I was often not sure what to do with the time I had to myself except to admire it, like a rare creature that inspires awe but also flabbergasts. I regretted every moment I was prevented from working and felt the pain of withdrawal when I worked. Even when the days seemed interminably slow, they still slipped by with a speed that seemed more uncontrolled than ever before. Then when my child became obsessed with clocks, I followed suit. I realised that I was witness to another awareness of time. As time sped up for me, I saw that to my child the same four years, that seemed so quick to me, were a lifetime. When we discuss it, he divides the whole of time into two categories of equal importance and perimeter: on one hand, the present and recent past, on the other, everything that has ever come before. So, the creation of the universe, the rise and fall of species, civilisations, all of that, he describes as the time in which he was “still a baby”. Which, I suppose, is not too dissimilar from how all of us probably relate to time. All of us experience time through our own experience of the present and of memories, channelling and interweaving collective and written memories as we do so. 

Simultaneously, some other things happened to send me – like Harold Lloyd – clinging to clocks. Edinburgh University and ASCUS got in touch with the idea that I might want to work with Alasdair Richmond, a philosopher at the university who specialises in the philosophy of time travel. We made A Conference for Chrononauts, a body of work based on a symposium for time travellers, which explored some of the conundrums Alasdair thinks about. While I was working on that project, Michael Start, from the House of Automata, asked me to make a picture for the book he was writing. The House of Automata restores antique automata and clocks, and the book Michael was working on was a history of the subject. The picture was to show the work of James Cox, the 18th century horologist and maker of fabulous automata, including his famous silver swan and golden peacock. While I was researching Cox, New Media Scotland commissioned me to make an animation to display in Aberdeen Music Hall. Out of the ideas I presented, the one they liked best was the one suggested by my child, making a big clock. This resulted in Chronoscope, an animated automata clock that shows a different animated vignette every fifteen minutes.

Edinburgh Printmakers offered to show Chronoscope in their gallery (the animation is constructed from collaged prints) and that I should build an exhibition around it. The universe, it was clear, wanted me to work on clocks.

Spending so much time talking clock to my kid, I started making drawings of a vast clock, the size of a city. People would live in the clock, or the Clock. In fact, the people living in it would be part of the clockwork somehow. But what kind of time would the Clock keep? It ought not to be the same as the clocks we use. 

Time measurement is culturally dependent, but most cultures have some basic similarity to their timekeeping resulting from a shared attention to the movement of the astral bodies and the fundamental unit of time: day and night. Often there will be a larger collection of days based on the behaviours of the sun and the moon in the sky. For our calendar, we use a solar year of 365 and months that are derived from a lunar system but have since been made to conform to the structure of the solar year. So this type of timekeeping is also based on spatial movements, the universe becomes a gigantic clock helping us to understand time by endowing it with comprehensible markers. We often forget that this type of cosmic timekeeping depends on perspective, mixing it up with the passage of time itself, and yet if one were to hop onto another planet, even what night and day would mean would be completely different. (Imagine timekeeping from the surface of the sun.) So even when we use the stars and planets to measure time, we understand it through a local human viewpoint. The Ancient Egyptians measured time by lining up priests against the night sky. It would have been easier and more accurate to use immobile poles in the ground, yet it must have been significant that the human body was used.

Meaning, it was going to be difficult to decide on what system my Clock would use. Human or cosmic? A symbolic set of numbers or latched on, somehow, to the physical world?

When you’re counting, you count away from something or towards something. How many years from birth, how many seconds till liftoff. Patterns emerge.  And with patterns, significance. In Ovid’s Fasti, each feast day in the Roman calendar (and almost every day was a feast day) is given a poem describing the customs around the celebration and the myth that justifies it. What a wonderful thing, I thought, to measure time in story. This would be how my Clock does it –the unit of time would be story. All stories, it would be human lives and deaths, the menstrual cycle and the creep of old age. 

A clock like this would risk becoming, like the Borgesian map, the thing that it measures. As far as I’m concerned, that’s not a problem. Carlo Levi observed that the digressions in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, apart from being comic, were a thickening of time, trying to slow it down, to delay the inevitability of death. A clock that ticked in digressions, trying to hold onto the present. 

Time in the present is a funny thing. If you look at a medieval Book of Hours, it is obvious how fundamental the agricultural seasons were to existence. Now, time is out of joint. To those lucky enough to live in affluent states, our awareness of those seasons has been dulled by a disconnection to the cycles of food production. We can buy fresh fruit at any time of the year. Summer flowers and winter snow are experienced by many people as decorative markers rather than vital to how life will be lived. Days bleed into nights to the glow of the electric light and the computer screen. Yet, we are hyper-attentive to the clock, no society before us has been so punctual and we can measure time with more precision than ever before. 

And the particularity of our experience of time includes our sense of what is to come. It is hard to avoid looking at world-destroying threats sitting just on the horizon, but we can only travel in the one direction. It feels like the clock is ticking down to zero hour, every second, the scraps of a finite resource, every fuel guzzling airplane belches away a bit more future. But then, anything might happen. I think of Kafka’s ‘A Little Parable’:

"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I am running into."

"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

Which would be another good place to stop.