—there lay the Days between— MIT List Visual Arts Centre, 2024
Katie Paterson’s work displays the number of times the sun has risen since the birth of planet Earth. The artist’s retooling of a split-flap display evokes a cosmic transit station, marking the departure of the night and the coming of the day.
At sunrise each day in the location where the work is installed, a faint ticking sound can be heard as the number flips forward by one. To come up with this figure, Paterson worked with a team of astronomers and astrophysicists. Their task was more difficult than it may appear: the length of a day has changed throughout the planet’s history due to factors like the moon’s gradually expanding orbit, tidal friction, and thermal evolution of the Earth’s core. Paterson and her collaborators researched these factors as well as theories of the planet’s origin and the history of human timekeeping. The sheer length of their final number creates a sublime sense of deep time and is also somewhat absurd in its pretention to precision.
Much of Paterson’s work seeks to materialize geological time and its human-driven acceleration. She has broadcast the sounds of a melting glacier (Vatnajökull [the sound of], 2007–08), filled a vial with dust from throughout Earth’s history (Requiem, 2022), and created a library of manuscripts that cannot be read for a hundred years (Future Library, 2014–2114). The placement of —there lay the Days between—within Building 54 resonates with the work of the building’s atmospheric and planetary scientists. The title of Paterson’s piece, drawn from a poem by Emily Dickinson, conjures both endlessness and a sense of bracketed time. There is enough space on the ticker for it to keep registering sunrises until the end of the Earth, some seven billion years from now.