Five Minutes to Moonflower (Published 2015)

While tempo and timing are crucial and contextually unique in living processes, the tempo and timing of clock-time are pre-set by the designer. Here, variation in tempo and timing would mean a malfunction of the clock.

our biology is tethered to the sun, yet the clocks society uses to keep time are influenced by a tangled web of political and historical factors.

One of the most affecting myths of clock time is that we all experience time at the same steady pace. We don’t. “The future is already here,” the science-fiction author William Gibson famously said in 2003, “it’s just not very evenly distributed.” And framing the climate crisis as a ticking clock with only a certain amount of time “to avoid disaste

But while nature may mete out time’s passage in these horological devices, it takes human observation of the heavens to set them. Even the most precise atomic clock must be periodically tweaked to account for variations in the earth’s rotation. Some clocks, however, are tuned more directly to nature.