Introduction
The Climate Clock challenge has been a unique opportunity to confront the design constraints of a 100-year project addressing climate change, where the durability of any approach requires us to address a project beyond our lifetime whose subject is in continuous flux. The goal is to create an artwork which inspires change in our collective behavior through raising awareness of climate change, within a budget of up to $20 million. This proposal provides what we see as most appropriate for dealing with the conceptual, cultural, and material sustainability of these conditions. At the core of our proposal is a belief that the project be distributed among generations of artists. In that way, what emerges over the next 100 years as the Climate Clock is a woven collective of artist visions, utilizing a variety of seeing modes, sensing technology, and calls-to-action in the context of climate change. The effect of these distributed artist actions is cumulative over the century, embedding the Climate Clock within the community and fostering public engagement more powerfully than any single, independent project. Rather than a liability, time becomes a partner of the Climate Clock, strengthening its message and shielding it from obsolescence.
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To ensure this longevity, we have allocated the predominant portion of the project budget to an endowment to fund a 100year Wired Wilderness artist-in-residence program, safeguarded by a custodial Wired Wilderness Trust. This unwavering monetary commitment would remain proportional to whatever total amount is committed to the project and provide the same primary funding opportunities for all future artists engaging the Climate Clock. The Wired Wilderness project will be evolutionary in character, providing a framework within which residency artists can fully exploit a wealth of advances in climate science and visualization technology. In the three years we have been developing this project, the rapid technological developments in sensing and visualization of the environment have evolved at an exponential rate, humbling our attempts to prescribe any specific technology to the project. Time-lapse cameras, sensor networks, LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging), Google Earth, social networking, and other technologies are advancing relentlessly, with more streamlined sensing methods debuting nearly every month. Our project will eventually benefit from currently classified or inaccessibly expensive technologies, which eventually become off-the-shelf and scalable.