There's No Clock in the Forest — Thomas Butterworth

Film, 02:03 Minutes.

Published in ISSUE X: CYCLES.

‘There’s No Clock in the Forest’ is part of an ongoing architectural investigation of the human experience of time in Epping Forest. In response to the overlapping and cyclical processes continually at work in the forest and their lack of conformity to the human experience of time, a device has been created which attempts to situate human visitors temporally in the unintelligible scales of the forest. Over an extended period of time spent at the Lost Pond, a site buried in the midst of Epping Forest, a series of seemingly arbitrary phenomena were observed which became increasingly dependable markers of the passage of time. A system of gear ratios map these observable phenomena onto time scales of the forest at the micro and macro scales, inviting viewers to eschew conventional metrics and engage in a new, situated relationship with natural time.