The Watch started with a question posed 200 years ago: If you were walking across a barren landscape and found a pocketwatch on the ground, how did it come to be there, and in this context, is it any different than an animal or plant?
This installation was a 16’ diameter version of that watch, embedded in the desert surface. As biologists look inside animals to trace evolutionary ancestries, answers lay within The Watch. The interior clockwork was exposed, with additional gears scattered nearby. Built as a zoetrope, each spinning cog told a story about how life came to be. Some cogs ran the ticking clockwork, stories that interlocked to form our best understanding of the evolutionary clock’s mechanisms. Other cogs were scattered nearby, telling origin stories discarded in favor of those that better fit with the scientific observations and discoveries of the past two centuries.
The Watch was installed as an honorarium supported project at Burning Man 2009 and seen by 50,000 attendees. The install area was approximately 20′x30,’ and the build in preparation took about 3 months with an all-volunteer crew of 30.
For more information, see the project site for The Watch at Burning Man 2009.
