The Watch is about the stories we tell to explain our own existence and that of the life around us, how these stories change over time, changing as we discover new things and our culture shifts in different directions.
The theme of the watch comes from a famous passage about the Design of animals, written in 1802 by the Reverend William Paley:
In crossing a heath… suppose I found a watch on the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place. That watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers… who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more.
This is that watch, discovered in the desert. But it is not just the object of Paley’s story. Just as clockwork mechanisms have evolved to tell more accurate time against the sun & stars, stories of our existence have evolved to better fit the fossil, anatomical and molecular evidence we find around and within us.
The gears of The Watch are zoetropes, each telling a brief animated tale
about our current knowledge of evolution. To fit with this demand for functionality, spinning of the gears/zoetropes will power the hands on the watch face, which will tell accurate time.
Surrounding The Watch are additional gears/zoetropes telling some of the discarded stories about how life came to be. To reinforce the near infinite variety stories that do not mesh with our modern view of evolution, participants will be able to add their own drawings into the animations in the zoetropes.
The stories of any mythology could be described as a set of gears that drive a clockwork vision of the world. The difference between the stories of Paley’s faith in a divine Artificer and our present scientific view of evolution is that the latter are constantly calibrated against the observed world around us and are adjusted and replaced when a better explanation is found or new evidence comes to light.
