Imagine a town clock that displays not the minutes and seconds that govern our lives, but time that moves faster or slower based on how fast rivers are running.
The Chattahoochee River and its tributaries flow through metropolitan Atlanta, but they hardly register for most people in the city — a disconnect that dismays Jonathan Keats. The San Francisco-based conceptual artist is on an extended stay in Georgia, where he’s been devising ways of encouraging people to interact more with their natural environment.
His latest concept, “Atlanta River Time,” would enlist volunteers to go down to riverbanks and take measurements. Their collective effort, supported by conservation groups and U.S. Geological Survey data, would tell time in an entirely different way, displayed on a large municipal clock in downtown Atlanta that reflects the natural ebbs and flows of Georgia’s waterways.
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