Visualization of Time
Stony Creek Quarry
Stony Creek, CT
1995
GENEROUS SUPPORT from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and the David Bermant Foundation - Color, Light, Motion
A VISUALIZATION OF TIME was Projects 2K's first staged and ticketed event conceptualized by Joy Wulke and famous laser artist Norman Ballard. The Quarry Sundial and Laser Chronometer was a monumental sundial in an abandoned quarry that involved the collaboration of 19 individuals including architects and artists, a composer, cantor, orator, laser composer, lighting designer, and location historian. The program consisted of evening performances of laser light acting as a chronometer following the North Star.
Invited artists and architects selected a number and designed the markers of time to be illuminated by the light and sound performance. Elements ranged from floating translucent house to electroplated fungus on glass, placed on the walls of the huge rock enclosure or floating on its reflective water.
The Sundial had two gnomons. One a pyramid created by ship masts installed on a small island in the quarry pond. The other was the quarry crane casting shadows on the vertical walls marking the hours as the shadow pointed to each sculpture.
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Creation Team
Norman Ballard, Project Originator & Creator of Laser Chronometer
Joy Wulke. Project Originator, Production Design & Sculptor
Jamie Burnett, Luminous Environments LCC, Lighting Design & Production Design
David Margolin Lawson, Sound Score
Michael Rush, Cantor
Jerry Prell, Orator
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The Hour Marker Artists
Richard Klein, 6 AM
Miguel A. Baltierra, 7 AM
Christine Flectcher Ingraham, 8 AM
Alan Kolkowitz & Chris Kusske, 9 AM
Gabor Gergo, 10 AM
Alison Sky, 11 AM
Gregory Cameron Spiggle, Noon
Susan Farricelli, 1 PM
Sam Wiener, 2 PM
David Connell, 3 PM
Jonathan Waters. 4 PM
Joy Wulke. 5 & 6 PM
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In the Media
Arts New England
The New Haven Register
Branford Review
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Concept Statement: Joy Wulke
As the 20th Century comes to a close, it is time to evaluate and explore what time has rendered during the past 100 years and what we see as our future. Some may fear the future and hesitate to plan for it. Without the courage and tenacity needed to plan for and create a positive future we are helpless, with these skills we can employ or imaginative tools to make our visions real.
Part of developing a positive outlook for our future is looking at our shared past. We are all subject to cycles of life. We are aware of the passage of time through the natural sequence of the day and its diurnal play of sun, moon, and stars.
As a visual trigger for dialogue on our interconnectedness with natural cycles, we have built a sundial in an abandoned quarry. A location that is emblematic of man's relation to the surface of the earth. The work is intended to offer a visual experience that blends nature, hand, and technology into a coherent statement about the beauty to be derived from the balancing of all three.
This work was conceived of by Norman Ballard with his study of gnomonic time and creation of a laser chronometer and Joy Wulke who has used the visualization of time in her sculptural work for over fifteen years.
By our enlivening of the half natural, half human created quarry landscape, participants are asked to remember their personal responsibility for the care of the earth, and to be aware of the ways in which we impose on it. The visual spectacle is meant to stimulate discussions of, and explorations into the ways in which our culture's collective hand can be either destructive or restorative.
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Concept Statement: Norman Ballard
From "The Ecology of Time"
As our entire global culture's awareness, sensitivity, and perception of the passage of time is brought to the fore and essentially heightened by the approach of a new millennium, a review of he evolution of our communal relationship to time reveals the gnomon of the classic sundial to be a double edged sword. At one a means to manifest the ordered cycle of nature and the cosmos for us, it also functioned as the harbinger of man's perception of sequential time, of time as units of uniform duration.
