The Passage - The Earth Has A Deadline

Decoding The Digital Numbers in Union Square Sep. 22, 2020 Metronome Amber James, Beam Living Amber James Community Journalist Union Square features several prominent artistic landmarks including the Metronome, a large digital number installation overlooking 14th Street. Ask around, and everyone has a different theory about what the numbers represent. The digital display once told the time in its own unique way, counting the hours, minutes and seconds (and fractions thereof) to and from midnight. But on Sept. 20, 2020, the digital clock got reprogrammed. Over the weekend, the Metronome turned into a Climate Clock. Messages including 'The Earth has a deadline' began to appear on the display. Then numbers — 7:103:15:40:07 — showed up, representing the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds left to dramatically reduce carbon emissions. Prior to becoming a Climate Clock, what were those numbers counting? The spinning numbers, titled “The Passage,” were part of a larger art installation called the “Metronome," which debuted in 1999. According to Kristen Jones, who designed the clock and the art on the north side of 1 Union Square South with Andrew Ginzel, the fifteen large LED digits display the time in 24-hour format. How it works: The clock’s seven leftmost digits tell time from left to right, as hours, minutes, seconds and tenths of a second (in military time). The seven rightmost numbers, from right to left, display the time remaining in the day. The number right in the middle represents a hundredth of a second -- and meant to reveal the frenzied pace of life in NYC. For instance, if the clock reads "195641189180304", it means that time is 19:56 (7:56 PM) and 41.1 seconds, and that there are 04 hours, 03 minutes, and 18.9 seconds remaining in the day. While the concept seems simple enough, the clock has caused much confusion. For example, during a few months in 2005, the clock on Metronome counted down the time until the International Olympic Committee was to announce the host city of the 2012 Summer Olympics. Then, for over a year in 2010–2011, the famous clock showed the wrong figures. According to the artists, "Metronome contemplates time: geological, solar, lunar, daily, hourly, and momentarily, revealing the fractions of seconds in the life of a city – and of a human being."