DeepTime Collective
Info
About / Contact
Amanda Evans
Tia Kramer
Work
A Day Without A Clock, 2024
Solo exhibition and day-long performance
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY
Produced during year-long artist residency by invitation (support from Garth Johnson and Adam Carlin), sponsored by an NEA Grant for Artist Projects
Is it possible for a museum to operate for a year, a week, or even a day without mechanical or digital clocks?
The clock is a tool we collectively agree upon to standardize and measure time. If this familiar tool is removed, what can be learned about how clocks to guide our daily lives?
Running a Museum Without Clocks
On Thursday, June 6, 2024, DeepTime Collective ran the Everson Museum from approximately 9:21 am to 8:40 pm without mechanical or digital clocks. The day-long performative experience reframed the clock for all apsects of the museum’s daily life, including the museum’s visitor experiences, staff offices, guard shifts, and public programming.
A Day Without A Clock was not a day without any clocks, but rather a day without the mechanical or digital clocks on our walls, devices, and wrists. Instead, those devices were replaced by ancient or proto-clocks such as sand timers, water clocks, and sudials that approximated the passage of hours. Around the museum, visitors and staff discovered alternative timekeeping devices crafted by the artists to maintain a semblance of the museum’s regular function.
Participants needing to know the time during A Day Without A Clock were encouraged to consult multiple timekeeping devices around the museum to approximate the hour and minute of the day. The more devices they encountered, the more accurately they could determine the time.
Additionally, the artists staged an intensive 10-hour performance with four performers who tended to these alternative clocks, ensuring some semblance of accuracy. Throughout the day, performers revealed that to create an institutional experience without a clock, the artists themselves had to embody the role of the clock. Precision was crucial, yet impossible to maintain through the softness of the body. While some of the artists’ tools were accurate, others were handmade and thus imprecise — the hand inherently has its limitations. Consequently, no one, including the artists, knew the exact time at any point during A Day Without A Clock.
Public Programming Without Clocks
Throughout the day, DeepTime Collective hosted a series of sequential, time-based public events developed in collaboration with community partners. Events started at approximate times, when enough community members arrived to determine the event should begin.
Public programming included...
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A participatory, time-based lunch-as-artwork with twelve community partners seated at a round table.
- Commissed readings of texts about time, clocks and prison, written by Project Mend, a group of formerly incarcerated writers in upstate NY.
- Songs for keeping time, a compilation of timekeeping, labor and protest songs sung by the Syracuse Community Choir.
- The Ganonhanyonh (Words that Come Before All Else) — the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, recorded by Chief Spenser Lyons, played every 59 minutes in the museum’s plaza as a reference to the Haudenosaunee Lunar calendar.
A full list of public programs can be found here.