Geotimes
Web Extra
Thursday, October 24
Beach walk through time
Last weekend
on a beach near Sausalito, Calif., several hundred people took a walk from the
beginning of time to the present. In a performance piece called the Sands of
Time, artist Chris Hardman and his company the Antenna Theater led an audience
from the Big Bang to the present, in an effort to show them that the year is
really not A.D. 2002, or 5763 in the Jewish calendar, or 1423 in the Islamic
one. It's actually about 13.2 billion (or 13.2B 2002 as the theater company
refers to it) plus a few thousand years, according to the most recent research
in the astronomical literature.
"I think the human race could learn a lot by understanding that both in
space and time, we are not the major players in the Universe," Hardman
says. "We're not the owners; we're just the visitors here … in a very
long process." He has been on a mission since the first performance of
this piece in 1998 to teach people to see time from the Big Bang, and not from
what he calls a culturally constructed conceptualization of time, such as the
religion-based time stamp of the year A.D. 2002.
Rodeo Beach, photo courtesy of Antenna
Theater.
Hardman has been perfecting the Sands of Time since the late 1990s, when he
created it in preparation for the turning of the last millennium. During the
performance of the show last Friday and Saturday nights, audience members walked
across Rodeo Beach, in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Under an almost
full moon, they traversed a triangle across the beach while listening to a soundtrack
from portable audio players hanging around their necks.
A series of raked paths akin to a Zen garden are lined by periodic artworks
illustrating the arbitrariness of the Gregorian calendar. For example, one display
shows a flood lit blanket with Elvis' image and a sleeve from one of his albums
as Hardman says on the tape: "You know, it doesn't have to be the Christian
era. It could be the Elvis era."
Through the Dark Ages, listening to Hardman's ideas about representations of
time and how it is much longer than we think, participants walked to the far
end of the beach to the zero point - the Big Bang. On the tape, Hardman interviews
Timothy Ferris of the University of California at Berkeley. Ferris, author of
"The Whole Shebang," and "Coming of Age in the Milky Way,"
is heard describing what scientists know about the formation of the universe
and of our own galaxy.
Every 100 feet,
the audience passed a large obelisk-shaped iron tower. Each of these billion-year
markers was topped with Roman numerals, and when audience members reached the
13th one, Hardman took over the narrative again.
"Pick up a grain of sand," his voice intoned into the audience's
ears. "In relationship to the entire beach you've walked down, that is
2,000 years."
Roman numeral towers, photo
courtesy of Antenna Theater.
Geologists and students are part of the audience Hardman wants to attract,
as they already know about "long time." But, he says, they need to
start thinking about time moving forward from a zero point rather than counting
backwards. Hardman says he will continue to tweak the Sands of Time piece, in
particular changing the zero point as astronomers get closer and closer to an
accurate age of the universe.
Last weekend's installation was washed away by a high tide at approximately
11 p.m., Oct. 19, about 13.2B 2002.
Naomi Lubick
Geotimes contributing writer
Links:
"Setting New Constraints on the Age of the Universe," by Ignacio
Ferreras et al. in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2001)
327(4):L47 Preprint pdf
Antenna Theater's All Time project
