A Wanganui artist's quirky take on time is part of an exhibition at Lower Hutt's Dowse Art Museum and got him an interview on National Radio on Saturday morning.
Julian Priest's work Local Time was part of the Local Knowledge show that opened at the Dowse on Saturday and finishes in March. In it, artists from New Zealand and overseas give their take on being in a place.
In Local Time, Priest constructed a large digital clock that only works when sensors are triggered at various points within the building and outside it.
"When someone walks in, a barista bangs the coffee grounds out, someone gets in the lift or the temperature goes up, the sensors create pulses that are sent to a computer. The computer interprets them as seconds and adds them to the time," said Priest.
When nothing happens, the clock stops. It goes faster and faster when it's busy. The 2.4m by 1m clock was built at The Green Bench Project Room in Wanganui's Guyton St, with the help of Priest's Wanganui friends, Nicholas Twist and Geoff Fugle, and Opunake robotics friend Andrew Hornblow.
The artist said people normally took their time from some external authority, which was, in reality, a negotiation between people and institutions worldwide.
In former days, people took their time from the movement of the sun. Later it was set locally, for example by a priest ringing a bell and it could vary from village to village.
"There was a kind of local time then. In my (art) work, the time is set by local people but also by the environment.
"Normally, we measure things that happen in the world by the external authority. In my work the external authority is created by events as they change. It's kind of letting us be clocked by the environment, rather than the environment clocking us."
He wants visitors to think about why they all have their watches set to the same time "and how we live inside infrastructures we don't really have much control over".
Being interviewed about the show in the Wellington studio of New Zealand's national radio station was a surprise and an honour. Priest said Kim Hill was an amazing interviewer.
"I just felt like I was in a room having a conversation with a nice, intelligent person. It was only afterwards, when my cellphone went crazy, that I realised I was having a conversation with the whole country."
He has lived in Wanganui for five years. During that time, he and wife Sophie Klerk have held 15 art-related events at The Green Bench, and run three Slow Flow excursions to get artists, scientists and environmentalists talking to each other. Priest also teaches AUT students for two days a week, in Auckland, in subjects relating to art using computers, electronics and programming as the media.