Landing Sites

Landing Sites is a live-streamed “clock”, intended for display in places of transit (e.g. train stations, airports, public squares, lobbies of public buildings), and whose face continuously cuts between sites around the planet in real-time, alongside displaying variables relating to the location, the local time of the site, and CPU/GPU performance of the local machine.

Each of these Landing Sites lies on a standard meridian and therefore aligns with the boundary of one of the Earth’s time zones. At each of the sites is placed a sculpture, at times visible in the frame, at times receding into the landscape. The “clock” cuts to a new scene once per minute and so completes a cycle of the Earth in 24 minutes. Alexander Walmsley's work relies on several tensions: between the “real” time of the planet and the “real time” of the computer; between the relentless tick of the CPU and the static nature of the frame; between the photorealism of the image and the computational process by which it is constructed; between metric precision and duration; between the local and the global; and finally between s(t)imulation and boredom.