60 fins: A very long now
In 2021, I had the honor of working with artist Alicia Eggert on a competition entry for a work of public art to be installed in a traffic roundabout in Fort Worth, Texas.
Sculpture proposal by Alicia Eggert in collaboration with H. Currently in development.
A Very Long Now encourages both living in the present and thinking in longer terms. There are 60 NOWs in total, which alludes to those small increments of time counted by clocks—the number of seconds in a minute and the number of minutes in an hour. Each NOW, like a brief moment in time, is so thin that it is almost non-existent when viewed from the side. Yet they all work together to create an upward-spiraling form that is more than the sum of its parts. That form is both linear and cyclical in nature, just like the different ways we perceive and experience Time. Some things in life are cyclical and seemingly infinite, like the path a clock’s hands travel around its face, the revolution of the earth around the sun, or the motion of a car driving around the roundabout. At the same time, other things are linear and extremely finite in nature, like the hours in a day or the length of a human life. Although the path of these NOWs comes to a finite end, hovering in the air above the road, they also suggest the potential of extending and spiraling endlessly outward and upward, into a future that does not yet exist.
—Alicia Eggert, competition entry
In true 2021 fashion, our collaboration began on Twitter when the Long Now Foundation re-tweeted Alicia’s call for help:
I made this quick sketch of a Long Now Loop for a public art project on a roundabout in Texas, and I’m looking for someone who could help me 3D model it on the computer. Please DM me if you have any recs! #longnow @longnow pic.twitter.com/kG8v0SQKoT
— Alicia Eggert (@AliciaEggert) August 9, 2021
Our team (which included another artist working on piece for a second, nearby roundabout and the curator that brought us all together), came in second place, and we thought the journey had come to an end, but in late spring of the following year, we learned that we would have the chance to build the piece after all.