Moment

Moment is a proposal for a public sculpture that tells stories about time. Located at the entrance to a park in the Seattle Washington suburb of Tukwila, its purpose is to wrap the population in the awareness of shared memories.

Moment is made of three parts. An LED display, a column and a bench.

High up is a daylight-visible LED sign on which constantly rotating texts tell the time through short narratives. These stories are single sentence quotes from literature and contributions collected from the community through workshops and a website. A new sentence is displayed every minute and each contains a reference to that specific time. In this sense it is a fully functional clock although you will have to read a bit more to find the time.

In the middle is a 12’ tall steel cylindrical tube with oblong apertures cut through it at skewed angles. Each of these apertures is keyed to the sun’s position at a specific day and time. Sunlight falls through these and light up a perfectly round glass disks embedded in the bench.

Below is a wide circular bench onto which the sun casts shadows. Embedded in this bench are a collection of hand made glass disks marked with information to commemorate specific occasions. These can be public holidays, such as Veteran’s Day, or moments in the life of the community that it would like to celebrate, such as the opening of the park’s Common Building. These disks both commemorate significant events in local and world history while referencing Seattle’s long history in the production of glass. 

The perception of time is one of the most fundamental aspects of the human experience. In essence, the piece takes what humanity often reduces to a cold, dry piece of information and returns the romantic attachments and subjective narratives which more closely represent how we experience time.