Counter Measures
How can we measure time in a way that centres long-term environmental change rather than human industry?
This is a question posed by the self-proclaimed “experimental philosopher” Jonathon Keats in Centuries of the Bristlecone, a site-specific work – and calendar – adjacent to the remote Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada. In the below essay, the art critic, science writer, and cultural geographer William L. Fox explores the project, looking at the site, its museological manifestation, and context within scientific and artistic research into “long time”.
The essay, titled ‘Counter Measuring’, is an excerpt from Thought Experiments: The Art of Jonathon Keats, a new book on Keats’ practice edited by Julie Decker and Alla Efimova, out on Hirmer Verlag now.
The Tree and the Clock
The Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada is one of the most remote public parks in North America. Its boundaries are less than five miles from the state border with Utah, and about equidistant from Arizona and Idaho. As the least visited park in the national system, its highest point is 13,064feet Wheeler Peak, which rises almost 8,000 feet above the arid border. The upper reaches of the park occupy an enormous view-scape, with Wheeler Peak the tallest mountain in 180,000 square miles. Just south along the same glaciated ridge system is Mt. Washington, which tops out at 11,657 feet. Near its summit is the park’s largest grove of Pinus lon gaeva, or bristlecone pine, members of which are the longest living individuals of any species on the planet. The exact location of the oldest specimens, which exceed 5,000 years in age, is kept secret.
Above the gnarled bristle cones on Mt. Washington is nothing but a wind-blasted, sunbaked gray limestone slope that rises to an azure sky. Beneath the grove is a maze of limestone cliffs that plunge thousands of feet. There’s no signage, no trail, no cellphone signal. Getting there requires a high-clearance, four-wheel-drive vehicle and the courage to ascend a series of steep switchbacks that are so tight they require you to first drive forward on one leg, then reverse up the next one, a process repeated numerous times. If you start the process facing the wrong way on the first switchback, you get the sequence wrong, which means you have to rotate 180 degrees in the middle of the slope. And that redirection involves hang ing the rear of the vehicle over empty space on a crumbling dirt edge. It is a significant understatement to say that the grove is well-protected from casual visitors. This is both a blessing and a curse.
Bristlecones grow in a few isolated groves in the American West just below the tree line in the harshest subalpine environments, perching between 5,600 and 11,200 feet in shallow alkaline soils that are unfavorable to almost all other species. Bristlecones like cold temperatures year round, high winds, and snow, all of which guarantee very short growing seasons, which is one reason why the trees live so long. They do not take to rain or warmth; try to grow them in your backyard and they’ll die of root rot. They are the most obdurate species of any large plant on the planet, and their exposed wood when dead simply erodes in the wind like stone. Sit beneath one long enough for your breath to calm, and you feel time creep over you like a slowly rising tide.
Bristlecones, by virtue of their age and hardness of wood, offer the longest continuous tree-ring sequences on the planet, which provide dendrochronologists a sure way to date the trees –and construct climate records that reach back more than 9,000 years. A mature bristlecone averages about 12 feet in diameter and is as much an aesthetic tour de force as a load of scientific data. They are revered, considered almost mystical beings, by both artists and scientists, and the groves are often protected by law. You’re welcome to pet one; just don’t try to cut down a specimen.
An ancient Mt. Washington bristlecone. IMAGE Ian von Coller.
The Long Now Foundation is a San Francisco nonprofit organization established in 1996; its primary goal is the building of a 10,000-year clock, an idea first conceived of by computer scientist Danny Hillis in 1986. The purpose of the clock will be to help reorient human society away from dangerously short-term thinking. As Stewart Brand, who cofounded organization with Hillis and friends such as composer Brian Eno, puts it:
Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of techno logy, the short horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multitasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the shortsightedness is needed – some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of longterm responsibility, where “longterm” is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth.
Inset into the border of the Great Basin National Park around 11,000 feet on Mt. Washington was a preexisting assemblage of eleven privately held mining claims dating back to 1916. The long and lofty sight-lines, the ancient trees, and that small inholding of private land that included part of the ancient grove made the site irresistible to the Foundation. The Foundation bought the consolidated properties in 1999, a total of 180.3 acres. Burying a massive mechanical clock driven by ceramic gears that would never rust amid the antediluvian trees was a perfect mixing of metaphors.
There were, however, issues. Like driving big trucks loaded with gigantic clockworks across the multiple jurisdictions of the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, and the National Park Service. And like driving the switchbacks. Almost everything, it turned out, would have to be transported by helicopter. And then there was simply the philosophical inconvenience of a construction site overhanging the edge of a national park. After some consideration, The Long Now Foundation moved the project to a mesa in West Texas owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and they have been happily drilling away there ever since. But they held onto the bristlecone land, a fact that conceptual artist and philosopher Jonathon Keats found... intriguing. Keats, who divides his time between Milan and San Francisco, had gone to grade school with Alexander Rose, the executive director of the Foundation. And Keats wanted to build a really, really longterm calendar, originally a 2,000-year device hitched to the growth rate of the redwood trees of California. After talking about the project during a talk given at the Foundation’s legendary bar in San Francisco, the Interval, Rose offered the bristlecones as a possible site.
Not planned as a companion piece to the clock, the eastern Nevada location with a timepiece on it would nonetheless create resonance with it. After all, Keats’ purpose for the calendar was related closely to Brand’s rationale for the clock: to shift and even unsettle human perception of time. And the bristlecones offered a long throw or arc of speculation for the project – the trees mature at 5,000 years.
The Tree and the Calendar
The Long Now clock, which is close to being completed, is calibrated to run on astronomical time and will be hand-wound by visitors as they climb up the 500foot shaft in Texas to reach the face of the clock. Once there, it will show them the time and date when the last visitor wound up the device, and the mechanism will activate the display of the current time and date based on the traditional astronomical time of the Gregorian calendar.
As Keats points out, pre-Classical Greece based its seasonal timekeeping on natural events, such as when certain constellations rotated overhead. The calendars were approximate, but sufficient to predict when to plant crops, for example. The Greeks simply added days as necessary when their calendar fell out of sync with natural rhythms. The early Romans adopted a lunar calendar, which lapsed out of seasonal cycles so rapidly that they had to suspend it each winter for recalibration in the spring. Julius Caesar modified the frequency to twelve months in a solar calendar that required adjusting only every few years. The Julian calendar was succeeded by the more accurate Gregorian calendar in 1582, which is now the system used by most countries in the world. As the human world began to be powered by steam and hence move faster, the keeping of consistent intervals of time across multiple scales became essential.
Western civilization deployed increasingly sophisticated and accurate timepieces to divide up the day, as well as adopting temporal protocols that crossed borders in order to avoid inconvenient accidents, such as trains attempting to run in opposing directions on the same track at the same time. Astronomical time led down a path of increasingly precisionist measures until you get to the current state of affairs, which is a clock that uses strontium87 atoms held at almost absolute zero in an optical lattice. It will lose or gain less than a second of time over fifteen billion years, that accuracy surpassing the known lifetime of the universe. This reliability would be useful for calibrating a speedometer when traveling at relativistic velocities approaching the speed of light, but Keats is thinking at the other end of the scale. He’s been wondering how we might link our sense of time to something non-Gregorian, and nonatomic, a way of contrasting human time with other temporal scales embedded in the natural world.
Trees produce a single ring of growth in the trunk every year, and while that is an annual indicator of the Earth’s repeated travel around the sun, it is nonetheless variable. If there’s a drought, for example, the ring is thinner than in wetter years. And, as the climate warms and there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, trees grow faster and produce larger rings – or they fail to cope and die. Basing a calendar on a bristlecone is tying one’s sense of time to the state of the environment – a state that we, by our actions, happen to affect rather profoundly. That could be unsettling indeed.
Keats plans to anchor titanium rods to bedrock on Mt. Washington, placing them at regular intervals around four bristlecones of differing ages. As the trees age and grow, they will incorporate the rods every few centuries, marking the passage of time. Visitors will decipher the process at viewing stations for each tree, these viewing stations taking the form of limestone stools on which calendar indications will be explained. Keats enthusiastically admits that the growth rate will vary not just from year to year and century to century, but from tree to tree, and that earthquakes, erosion, pine beetles, pine blister rust, and any number of other variables will also produce different results for each tree. The cumulative effort would be an increasing divergence from the Gregorian calendar; but the point is not so much the measuring of time as the conscious considering of it, which would be in line with his artistic practice.
A titanium calendar ring. IMAGE Chris Murphy.
The Artist and the Museum
If one had to pick an overarching concern within the works and speculations made by conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, it would be how humans interact with time – our perceptions of it, our ideas about it, and how we conceive it to be an irreversible arrow. The Nevada Museum of Art in Reno also has an overarching concern: how art expresses our perceptions and interactions with our natural, built, and virtual environments. In the proposed geological epoch of the planet’s history we now tentatively identify as the Anthropocene, time has become a serious preoccupation of many artists who are creating works that investigate and even seek to manipulate the relationships people have with the world in general and their own environments in particular. It seemed inevitable, therefore, that the Museum’s research institute, the Center for Art + Environment, would seek out Keats to create a public work of art about time that would also generate a permanent archive for scholars, students, and other artists to study well into the future. The Museum has commissioned Keats to build his Centuries of the Bristlecone, the first of a series of monumental calendars he will construct in different locations in which time will be contingent based on changes in the environment, changes that in many cases will be driven at least in part by human activity.
Born in New York City in 1971, Keats studied philosophy at Amherst College, and self-identifies as an “experimental philosopher,” meaning that he conducts experiments in the real world which manifest propositions. For example, in 2000 he sat in a chair for 24 hours alongside a model who posed nude in a gallery. He sold his thoughts during the event to patrons at prices derived by dividing their annual income per person per minute. In 2003 he copyrighted his mind in order to obtain the intellectual property rights to it for the lawful 70 years after his death, a kind of theoretical extension of his life span toward immortality. He also sold future contracts on his brain to fund the posthumous marketing of his thoughts. In other projects, Keats has tailored the metric system to patrons using the frequency of their heartbeats as a basis for time, and created gourmet photosynthetic meals for plants at the Crocker Museum of Art in Sacramento by using color filters to add culinary enjoyment to photonic nourishment. Keats is also the speculative entrepreneur who in 2013 created Spacetime Industries, which offered to increase the amount of time available to human beings. Einstein’s theory of relativity states that time slows down near massive objects. So Spacetime Industries offered Time Ingots for sale –heavy bars of a lead alloy wrapped in blue paper – which, if you kept them near you, would have the effect of slowing down time locally. Keats estimated that a Time Ingot would increase the time that you experienced relative to other people by less than one second between now and the end of the universe. That is a very small amount of time, but the effect was very real.
Although Keats produces numerous projects about everything from quantum physics and string theory to the behavior of cyanobacteria and the electrochemical properties of Chinese currency, time never seems to be far from the core of his concerns. In 2010 he released a box camera printed in a magazine and designed to be cut out and used as a pinhole camera capable of making a single 100 year-long exposure. More recently he installed a camera outside the Arizona State University art museum that is taking a 1,000-year image of, among other things, the city’s skyline and climate change. The camera uses oil paint instead of photographic film; during the course of the millennium, pigments in the paint will fade where the light is brightest, and slowly create an image of the world. The role of the artist was to initiate the project, and viewers in 3015 or so will complete the process when viewing the final image.
The latest in the series of millennium cameras is being in stalled in four locations around Lake Tahoe that sit astride the California/Nevada border. Commissioned by the nonprofit organization Tahoe Public Art, Keats stated in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor: “These are philosophical instruments. These are means to reckon with the unreckonable. And they are very much products of our times. But they are also meant to allow us to see the world, the future, and the greater context of human experience out side of the limited experience and the limited framework of our times.”
Keats has envisioned how audiences will encounter his Centuries of the Bristlecone along two major axes of experience. One is to spend physical time with it on Mt. Washington. He plans for visitors to park on the dirt road by the Mt. Wheeler Mine adit, a horizontal tunnel at 7,850 feet. Leaving behind your vehicle at that point means no-one will have to deal with those switchbacks on the jeep track above. From the adit site, they will hike to the sculpture situated above 11,000 feet. Three rest stops along the way and perhaps a small discrete lodging will await them at the top. The next day they will consider the living calendar in the morning, then descend back to their vehicles. The experience would integrate the duration of their visit, the slowness of the hike, the passage of the day into night, with the temporal as well as spatial environment of the grove.
But not everyone can nor should go to Mt. Washington. It will remain a rare experience for viewers. Subalpine environments are austere and handsome, but often physically difficult to access and always fragile – that blessing and curse business. There’s a solution, however, that is not merely a workaround, but one that enriches the project. Scientists from the University of Nevada, Reno already have an electronic dendrometer attached to a nearby bristlecone pine that measures the daily transevaporation and growth of the tree down to the micron, then transmits the data to Reno. Keats will use the data sent to Reno, where it will be translated into the movement of gears in a proposed massive electromechanical timepiece set into the floor of the Museum. The growth of the tree, which currently averages a one-millimeter (0.039 in) increase in trunk diameter per year, will be manifested by the movement of an index on the face of the calendar.
The technology to keep a mechanical calendar functioning so slowly over such a long time has already been pioneered by The Long Now Foundation’s engineers. The current plan for the calendar, which positions it in the lobby floor of a Museum expansion under design, calls for the device to be relatively thin and set under a round window of glass 12 feet in diameter, the mechanism lit from within the floor. It may, in fact, be the centerpiece of a small amphitheater used for education events. Numbers etched on the gearing will display movement from the scale of minutes to millennia. The face of the calendar will use a telescoping rod that will follow a spiral track outward to the 5,000-year mark. The tree will be breathing at the Museum as it is on the mountain, as it were. Audiences will be able to see the data from the natural world, but also touch Centuries of the Bristlecone remotely, and in a larger context, as data becomes information. That is, they can query what the data means as they compare it over time.
The Nevada Museum of Art, founded in 1931, and its research program, the Center for Art + Environment (CA+E), which opened its doors in 2009, have long been interested in and collected materials from the Land Art movement, which started in America in the Southwest deserts, where cheap land was available and the view-scapes unencumbered. The end result was a group of sculptures meant to last for long periods of time. Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) were the first two large-scale works, and they have already suffered, respectively, severe erosion and rising levels of water and salt. But, almost immediately, later works such as Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976) and Heizer’s City (1972– ) were engineered with more resilient materials and in more stable situations, designed to be around for centuries, if not longer.
It was Holt who pioneered a more profound relationship for the Land Artists with space and time, orienting her four huge concrete culvert tubes in a cross that aligns with sunrise and sunset on the summer and winter solstices. In addition, the cylinders are pierced with smaller holes corresponding to the major stars of the constellations of Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn. In effect, her sculpture evokes the prehistoric rock art sites around the world that mark solstices and equinoxes. Keats, in erecting an outdoor place-specific work and linking it with a massive stone sculpture that runs on biological versus astronomical cycles, echoes some of the earlier Land Art projects, but also decenters the traditional commanding presence of the individual artist in those projects. He’s simply not going to be around for most of the life of his work.
The site of Keats’ Mt. Washington Site calendar. IMAGE Julie Momméja.
There is yet a third axis of encounter with Centuries of the Bristlecone, and that is with the archive of the project from conception and design through construction and public responses already being collected by the Center, where it joins materials by early Land Artists and other practitioners expressing change over time in various environments, such as photographically documenting the changing ice-scapes of glaciers around the world in response to rising temperatures. In turn, these projects and their archives are linked to the next set of timekeeping devices that Keats is developing in Alaska for the Anchorage Museum, the Alaska River Time Initiative. This effort is planned ultimately to include several interconnected components that will together engage multiple constituencies to explore river time from multiple vantages: a large-scale municipal clock in Anchorage, stone calendars in glacial rivers throughout Alaska, and river-time-calibrated performances by Alaskan orchestras and dance companies. All three of these elements will be connected through the Anchorage Museum.
To describe just one component of the project, which is closely related to the bristlecone calendar, the clock will be displayed in a public place in central Anchorage and calibrated to run at the same rate as standard time in current climate conditions. An average increase or decrease in the flow rate of the measured rivers will cause Alaska River Time to pass at a relatively faster or slower pace. The clock will reveal and record change in the moment and over the long term. The former will be visible in the deviation of minutes and hours from an “ordinary” clock or watch at any given time. The latter will be manifest in the calendar indication, which may eventually deviate from the Gregorian Calendar by centuries.
Time and Art and Science
The point of such large projects is to make the world temporarily a stranger to us, to open up a gap between the world we take for granted and the world as it may be, thus invoking wonder in us by making us perceive the world anew. Keats, by forcing us to experience a divergence in two different time streams, the celestial and the biological in Nevada or the celestial and geological in Alaska, is acting as a time-traveling provocateur. Of course, all art is a time based medium in several senses; artworks are of a time and within time. A painting may capture a landscape scene in time, or the state of the mind of the artist; a sculpture may react to wind on an hourly basis, or the passing of sunlight across its surface. But art is also time-bound. As art historian Gary Schwartz pointed out in 1996 in his essay ‘Ars Moriendi: The Mortality of Art’, more than 90 per cent of artworks disappear within one hundred years of their creation: war, fire, flood, insects, sinkholes, divorce, the accidental spill of coffee, and just oxygen and sunlight oxidizing everything. Museums can slow down this process, but never stop it entirely. The goal of archiving art projects is a momentary stay against entropy, an effort to take what we know now and to project it as far into the future as possible.
The Nevada Museum of Art started collaborating with Jonathon Keats in the summer of 2015. It’s not a simple process, preparing to site and build a bi-locational monumental environmental art work when final designs for it are not yet completed. But that’s the nature of art predicated upon multi-century scientific observation, a practice that has been mostly unsuccessful throughout human history – much less such observation conducted by remote-sensing devices in challenging environments. Scientists have done a fine job of observing natural phenomenon over centuries, such as the occurrence of sunspots, the first report of which was made by Chinese observers around 800 BC. Chinese astronomers began keeping imperial records of them by no later than 28 BC, and the English began recording sunspots in 1128 when a monk made drawings of them. By 1611, telescopic observation of longterm sunspot cycles had begun. But all that constitutes collection of natural data, not experimentation. The longest-running experiment is conceded to be by William Beal, an American botanist who buried 20 bottles of seeds in 1879 to see how long they would remain viable, or able to germinate. Bottles are dug up at regular intervals, the experiment due to conclude in 2100. But if you want to understand how life arose in the universe, and what its future might be, you need to be able to study the viability of microbes for millennia. Enter astrobiologist Charles Cockell at the University of Edinburgh.
Astrobiologists study life in non-terrestrial environments. They are interested in how and where life arose, how it has evolved, and where it might go in the future. Under standing how and for how long microbes can survive in such environments requires very long arcs of experimentation, given that bacteria found in the deep-sea sediments of Earth have been found to continually repair their DNA for 500,000 years and reproduce every 10,000 years. There are increasingly verifiable reports of scientists reviving microbes found in salt crystals that are 250 million years old.
In 2014, Cockell initiated a 500-year study of how long two species of desiccated microbes would remain viable. In discussion with colleagues from other disciplines, further questions arose that needed multi-century study: things like how long it takes a leaf to become a fossil, or how long it really takes different kinds of plastic to degrade. The challenges are formidable. You have to agree upon, then design and maintain, not only physical parameters and controls for variables such as temperature and light, but also systems to record and archive the information. But the toughest obstacle is simple human neurobiology. We evolved to make decisions for the short term. As a result, society is ill-equipped to maintain interest in and support for longterm scientific research. One of the countermeasures to our short attention span is art, assuming you can get it to last long enough.
Keats and the Nevada Museum of Art have been struggling with this in terms of how long data from the bristlecone grove across the state will be maintained in a continuous stream. Originally funded by federal grants, the electronic collection and transmission of data is now managed by a small handful of researchers at the University of Nevada, Reno and the Desert Research Institute by contributing funds and volunteering their time. The data stream has already narrowed in terms of output, and when the scientists and technicians move on or retire, it is reasonable to expect that the electronic data stream may collapse. To keep the museum’s calendar operating may require people to visit the tree at 11,000 feet in person, put a string around the trunk to measure its annual growth, then get the figure to the museum, where the gears would be advanced manually. This is a strategy that could be deployed with any of the devices proposed by Keats, but it would require the parent organizations to foster art rituals in support of the longterm endeavors, whether in Alaska, Nevada, or elsewhere. For Keats, the transition to ritual would carry temporal significance in its own right.
Cockell and colleagues have now founded the Laboratory for MultiCentury Science in Edinburgh. Keats and Cockell have been talking about a project that the artist is developing with geologist Harrison Lisabeth at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, called The Geological Clepsydra. A clepsydra is an ancient kind of water clock that measures time by the amount of water flowing into or out of a vessel; the clepsydra envisioned by Keats measures the flow of rock. Scientists sometimes classify stone as a liquid of extreme viscosity, which means the flow is so slow it is imperceptible to the eye. Keats is working not just on timepieces run by bristlecones and glacial rivers, but also on tidal and flood devices, from settings as far apart as the Ticino River in Switzerland to the meanders in Telluride, Colorado – and is even design ing an aeolian version for Arizona, where one of his millennium cam eras is perched. Anything natural that exhibits change over time is fair game to drive a calendar. Stone is slow, and it will take a network of devices to create comparisons of the flow of different rocks. Here’s how Keats described it in mid 2020.
The first set of Geological Clepsydrae will be made out of granite. A three meter-long cantilevered slab will gradually dip under the influence of gravity, a phenomenon that will be observed by looking at how the slab aligns with markings on an adjacent granite block. After a multi-decade calibration period, during which the flexure will be measured with piezoelectric sensors, the markings will be inscribed with future years corresponding to predicted dipping, so that the slab can be used as a monumental multi-millennium calendar.
This first manifestation of granite time will be mounted outdoors and in controlled conditions; the second version will be built outside and exposed to changes in the environment as they occur. The flow of the slabs will diverge over thousands of years and more: the first representing time as a constant compared to the latter, which will capture time “as an emergent phenomenon of the planet.”
Concept drawings by Jonathon Keats.
While Jonathon Keats wants us to think about the nature of time – literally and metaphorically – he is also providing us with a way to apprehend how other species and processes conduct themselves in the world, a planet where we have increasingly altered the environment to suit our needs over the millennia without, for the most part, accounting for anything else, whether animate or inanimate. There is little chance that the Reno and Anchorage museums will last thousands of years; societies and their built environments change too often and too rapidly to offer that kind of stability. That’s not the point. Keats is not making a Pharaonic attempt to build monuments; rather, he is proposing philosophical instruments to provoke our thoughts and perhaps to change our relationship to the world.
As coronavirus pandemics and other global disasters remind us, push on the world and it pushes back. Philosophy studies the most abstract outer edges of cause and effect in all the implications possible to think. It arose as a collective endeavor that is meant to now include the underlying tenets of religious studies, science, and art. It proceeds, in large part, by relentless comparisons made among cultures, species, and the worlds they inhabit, comparisons that are rigorous and inevitable. That’s a meta-definition of philosophy. And that is where the profoundly prickly nature of what we call “time” exists. That fundamental aspect of the universe can’t be understood without all of the tools available to us: science and art and, yes, religion. (That’s why Keats and I use the word “ritual” when discussing how to maintain “timepieces.”) This is why this most expansive definition of philosophy is needed in this context, to account for why both science laboratories and art museums are building the clocks of Jonathon Keats.
Words William L. Fox.
This chapter is an excerpt from the book Thought Experiments: The Art of Jonathon Keats, edited by Julie Decker and Alla Efimova, out on Hirmer Verlag now.