Landing Sites
A live-streamed “clock” that transports viewers across the globe, “Landing Sites” cycles through real-time scenes from different time zones every minute, juxtaposing sculptural interventions in landscapes with digital metrics to explore tensions between computational precision and planetary temporality.
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 a series of sites around the planet in real-time, alongside displaying a number of variables relating to the location, the local time of the site, and CPU/GPU performance of the local machine. Each of the sites - the so-called “Landing Sites” of the work’s title - 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 clearly 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.
The work relies on a number of tensions: between the “real” time of the planet and the “realtime” 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.
Team
This is a project of the Creative Technologies research associate Alexander Walmsely.
Alexander Walmsely's personal webpage: https://www.alexanderwalmsley.co.uk/landing-sites-2025